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“... centres.’ The union is arguing that the centres are understaffed and wants the new mayor, Eric Adams, a former police officer, to hire an additional two thousand officers. It has also requested he drop the ban on solitary confinement (coyly referring to it as ‘punitive segregation’), which has yet to come into effect. Lawyers and campaigners for ...”

“... of panoptic logocrats? ‘Who whom?’ is famously a political as well as a linguistic question. Robert Burchfield in his deft and delightful book still hopes that it is possible to be a true liberal (that is, only wishy and not washy), so he says that ‘the formal distinction ... is breaking up but should be maintained where possible.’ (Would it really ...”

“... female Thucydides’, though when she attacked his late father, the former prime minister Robert Walpole, he backtracked, deciding she was a ‘foolish’ nihilist, ‘levelling all for no end or purpose’. Her writings on female education influenced Mary Wollstonecraft. Understandably, the profile of such a radical figure dimmed at home during the ...”

“... man who takes no part in the everyday work of the institution, or of the world, seems to me a person of very uncertain value. He does not dig ditches, or lay bricks, or write school-books, his product is not of the ordinary, useful, though humble kind. What will it be? It may be something of the highest utility; but, on the other hand, it may be ...”

“... My dear Lady Olliffe,’ Robert Browning wrote in March 1877: I have just been reading my old friend Miss Martineau’s protest against the publication – and indeed, retention – of all correspondence. Here, now, is a sample of mine: be assured I shall never demand it again, from any apprehension that hereafter the friendliness in it may be at variance with whatever feeling I please to entertain thirty years hence ...”

“... but points out that in the summers of 1902 and 1903 Homer Pound and his wife let their house to ‘Mr W.B. Hackenburg, president of the Jewish Hospital Association’. Clearly Pound’s parents ‘would take Jews as tenants’. All three of Pound’s major biographers begin with an evident and inevitable awareness that Pound’s is a stingingly complicated ...”

“... a genre centred on ‘a definition of mankind’, does that not look – remembering Star Wars and Mr Spock – by some way too ambitious? Is Aldiss not, as he was in this book’s 1973 precursor, Billion Year Spree, a trifle over-persuaded by Mary Shelley? There is of course much to be said for seeing Frankenstein as simultaneously a Gothic novel and a work ...”

“... right – appear to regard Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and John Adams as the American equivalents of Plato, Aristotle, Cato and Brutus, while the wider culture acknowledges the near-superhuman qualities of the men of 1776. The founders in their periwigs, breeches and frockcoats hold a secure place in the popular iconography ...”

“... claim to immediacy. Michals’s collage portrait of the Sterling Black and Whiters – Ansel Adams, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Salgado and so on – shows us which reputations were overshadowed by the new high-art photography. At the Tate there are photographs from both camps. One odd effect of the high art/common craft ...”

“... In English, ‘favourite’ was distanced, but only by a margin, from the French mignon. Sir Robert Naunton famously insisted that Elizabeth I’s ministers were ‘only favourites, not minions’. Was her first minister for much of the reign, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, such a favourite? In this volume, Paul Hammer distinguishes his position from that ...”

“... of the sort happened. The late Gordon Childs, who had worked in propaganda in the USA, told me that as a morale-booster, when inspecting factories in the war, the Duke of Windsor was streets ahead of any British or American public figure. If he had made a go of his assignment to the Bahamas, he could have been in a position to exact a rewarding ...”

“... he was. ‘They used to joke that 12 was their lucky number,’ their daughter Helen McKendry told me. ‘He was 12 years older than her, and 12 inches taller, and she had 12 pregnancies.’ Jean McConville was ‘disappeared’ by the IRA in December 1972. Few remember her life. Even the memories of her children, most of whom were very young at the ...”

“... promises Obama hadn’t kept, and Obama, where no response was necessary, chose to say: ‘Let me just make this point, John, because we’re not campaigning any more: the election’s over.’ Before the putdown, McCain had looked small and confused – there was dead air all around him – but Obama by his response awarded him the pathos of a beaten ...”

“... On 1 February 1968 Eddie Adams took a photograph of the South Vietnamese chief of police standing in the street and shooting a Vietcong suspect in the head. The picture is listed on the web as one of the ‘100 photos that changed the world’. For years I thought that it recorded the blood spurting out of the side of the man’s head as the bullet went into his temple ...”

“... remark, about choosing to betray your country rather than your friends, has always seemed to me to be – as well as an exercise in moral casuistry – the father and mother of a false antithesis. I mean to say, who ever is actually faced, or has been faced, with such a choice? In 1917 or thereabouts, Siegfried Sassoon confided to his friend ...”