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“... Historians​ of Northern Ireland have plenty of material to work with. A book called Lost Lives (2001) records the lives and deaths of each of the 3720 people who were killed during the Troubles. Fighters, activists, officials and politicians on all sides have spoken to the media and written books themselves. Public inquiries have published hundreds of pages of hitherto secret evidence ...”

“... The Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, known for his three-volume hagiography of Freud, was also the author of a book on figure skating. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute owns a dusty copy, which is illustrated with drawings of the elegant squiggles skaters were supposed to leave on the ice: ‘Only in a certain type of dream,’ Jones wrote, offering a clue to his other area of expertise, ‘do we ever else attain a higher degree of the same ravishing experience of exultantly skiing the earth ...”

“... of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ideas which have often ...”

“... In her posthumously published book, Reconciliation, Benazir Bhutto named a man who she believed had tried to procure bombs for an unsuccessful attempt on her life in Karachi in October 2007: I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned … a bomb maker was needed for the bombs. Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a wanted terrorist who had tried to overthrow my second government ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... for his stewardship of the Party. ‘I am deeply ashamed,’ he began. Unfortunately for Mervyn Jones, who both loves and admires his subject and would have us dwell on other things, it is the freeze-frame of that moment which lives on. For Foot had led Labour to its worst defeat since 1922, a defeat so bad that it handicaps Labour still. In almost exactly ...”

“... rather than merely economic. In the 1850s a substantial number of socialists had followed Robert Owen into spiritualism and his son, Robert Dale Owen, became a leader of the spiritualist movement in America. Interest in ghosts and communication with the dead was also a preoccupation of the early Fabians. So much so that ...”

“... for a short time. One of the programme’s great coups was an interview that Kofi Annan gave to Owen Bennett-Jones in 2004 in which Annan said that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. The Interview has now been replaced by the BBC World television programme Hard Talk, in a version for radio. The decision appeared ...”

“... those few who haven’t heard – comparing faces and states of mind.’ In John living’s Owen Meaney, one mythic hit (‘so unusually sharp and loud’) led to death and Christian conversion. To the British, baseball seems to be simply a spruced up version of rounders. To American writers it is like village cricket: a touchstone of a nation’s soul ...”

“... rely on the most frugal plotting: since the crime has already been committed (the abduction of Owen Kane, the killing of Robert, the RUC officer), the narratives are internalised – rueful accounts of the lives of good but guilty men. The action is economical, the characters entirely engaging: both novels were made into successful films, full of ...”

“... predictably on the Establishment snobbery personified by the prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones. No one, as Inglis says, can resist quoting his rhetorical question to the jurors: was Lawrence’s novel the sort of thing they would wish their wives or servants to read? But the routine satirising of Griffith-...”

“... to train for a supernaturally revealed task. The hero of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, must master a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not taken, isn’t the novel at all but ...”

“... goes nuts, as if they’re on drugs, except they aren’t. His tastes are eclectic: The Who, Tom Jones, Prince, Freddie King, Rihanna, P.J. Harvey. ‘The music jolts through their bones, moving their arms, working their hips.’ It’s all very ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’, which is to say it’s also a little clichéd.The politics of Vernon Subutex are ...”

“... for power and their early heady days in office. It was in an interview with one of them, Thomas K. Jones, whom President Reagan appointed Deputy Under-Secretary of Defence for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theatre Nuclear Forces, that Robert Scheer heard the phrase from which he took the title of his book: ‘if there are enough shovels to go ...”

“... of the Revolution were mainly Communist sympathisers like Edgar Snow, Anna Louise Strong and Owen Lattimore. After the gruesomeness of the war in Korea, their expertise was at a discount and the State Department was purged of the sort of people who might, if they had stuck around, have helped avert the inane policies that eventuated in the Vietnam ...”