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“... Sons: The Story of Iran’s Boy Soldiers, written shortly after the end of the war by a Briton, Ian Brown. I was struck by one account, a basiji’s recollection of his baptism of fire, at the age of 13. After only a month’s training at a camp near Khorramshahr I was sent to the front. When we arrived we all assembled in a field where there must have ...”

“... way down to the beach, where an old ship lay rusted on the rocks. Out in the wilds, death is the black backing on the mirror that allows you to see anything at all.That night Seamus took the country temper back to the city, talking, in company with Marie and us and a lamb stew and a bottle of Montrachet, of Robert Lowell the week before he died. ‘It’s ...”

“... of rebuilding – Sunderland, say, or Portsmouth – get less attention. Birmingham, which, as Ian Nairn pointed out approvingly in the mid-1960s, was transformed beyond recognition in less than a decade, features little, with the exception of the local firm John Madin Design Group. Harwood ends several chapters with terse accounts of what was successful ...”

“... ascent. In July 1933, he married Honor Guinness, daughter of the Second Earl of Iveagh, whose black stuff from the brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin had made the family enormously rich. In best 18th-century fashion, Channon acquired a fortune, a house in Belgrave Square, a country house at Kelvedon in Essex and a seat in the House of ...”

“... was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air travel was assumed to be a given, the ...”

“... said after Fadime’s death, ‘because I was afraid of fanning the flames of racism.’ Southall Black Sisters, the first group to raise the profile of honour-based violence in this country, have long argued that cultural defences are a tool used by men to justify violence against women. For Radhika Coomaraswamy, the former United Nations special rapporteur ...”

“... IT worker called Alex, putting in a shift before she headed south to the much bombarded Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv to visit her parents. We headed past the colossal steel Motherland statue, a third as tall again as the Statue of Liberty, crossed the Paton Bridge over the Dnieper and hit the dual carriageway to Chernihiv. As we entered the ...”

“... decide the competition between alternative sentences (for example, between ‘red wins’ and ‘black wins’ or between ‘the butler did it’ and ‘the doctor did it’). In such cases, it is easy to run together the fact that the world contains the cause of the sentence being true with the idea that that cause, that state of the world, is itself an ...”

“... would soon reach him. He called his brother at 1.30 and left a message saying there was black smoke everywhere. People could have made for the stairs at that point, but they were told to stay put. And it quickly became evident that some people were trapped. Tall ladders were needed, but they are scarce in Central London and the first one didn’t ...”

“... dull that it nauseated me’. But the imaginative arts lined up to pay tribute. In Cambridge, Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt spoke about their ‘literary relationship with Darwin’. The joint Yale-Cambridge museum homage, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge and the Yale Center for British ...”

“... underwent further, critical changes in the 1980s, with the rise of small export firms and a black economy – the ‘second Italian miracle’, as it was hopefully referred to at the time – the party was unprepared again, and this time the blow to its standing as the political representative of the collective labourer proved fatal. Twenty years ...”

“... there were a couple of titles by Ngaio Marsh, a batch of paperbacks by Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming and an incomplete, untouched set of Dickens in pale blue cloth bindings. Nobody went near the Dickens – Colin, a reader of contemporary paperbacks only, declared a hatred of him for his infatuation with the poor and his longwindedness. Maureen ...”

“... in isolating the retrovirus that caused Aids: ‘a pear-shaped particle with a dense and very black core at its centre, entirely unlike anything ever seen’. It was established that the virus could be transmitted via semen, vaginal fluid and blood. After entering an individual’s bloodstream and cells, it replicated and mutated extremely rapidly, before ...”

“... with Menderes’s, Demirel’s brand of populism ended in larger deficits, higher inflation, wider black markets and lower growth. Deteriorating economic conditions were compounded by increasing civil violence, as the far right stepped up its campaign against the left, and a medley of revolutionary groups hit back. Worst affected were Alevis – communities ...”

“... from far away, except that these ‘outsiders’ were born far away in time, rather than space. Ian McEwan openly expressed the motif last year when he looked forward to a more liberal future Britain in 2019, cleansed of ‘1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves’. It’s odd, and not just because McEwan, at 69, isn’t exactly a ...”