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“... as ‘the Ambassadors’ Plot’ or ‘the Lockhart Plot’. Reilly is a secondary character in Jonathan Schneer’s The Lockhart Plot; Neal Ascherson, reviewing the book in the LRB (5 November 2020), describes him as an ‘ungraspable rogue’. Schneer gives a detailed account of the plot and its failure. In brief, it turned on subverting the regiments of ...”

“... about what it used to be like to stay at the Ritz.A fashion magazine at the height of its power was measured by its weight. American Vogue’s September 2012 issue, its fattest ever, was 916 pages and weighed a beefy five pounds. The heft came from the many pages purchased and filled by glamorous advertisers – Chanel, Dior, Vuitton, Gucci, Bottega ...”

“... the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key ...”

“... in two forms around the Peace of Utrecht: on the one hand, in the new conception of a balance of power – a phrase inscribed for the first time in the treaty – between the rival realms of Europe, an idea developed in England by Charles Davenant and Jonathan Swift; on the other, in the ideal of a federation of states to ...”

“... ultimately unbearable face of the anarchistic powers of capital’. The Nazis were legally in power, and Goebbels didn’t want people to see a film about toppling governments, or toppling the very idea of government.I need to explain why I (and others) think the film is anti-authoritarian, or authoritarian in an unorthodox way. First, let’s consider ...”

“... courage or the luck – from a project one had taken to be one’s own. ‘A courageous person,’ Jonathan Lear has suggested, ‘has a proper orientation towards what is shameful and what is fearful.’ We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation towards what is shameful and ...”

“... 2’ in History is a 14-line redaction of that, ending ‘my namesake, not the last Caligula’ (Jonathan Raban once suggested that Lowell’s idea of ‘revision’ was to throw on more negatives). As for ‘Caligula 1’ – that’s a revision of a translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ that first appeared in Imitations. And so on, and so on, and so ...”

“... been a different sort of politician, but that he might not really be a politician at all. When Jonathan Freedland interviewed him recently for the Guardian, he started by asking: ‘Are you a writer who became a politician, rather than a politician who’s done some writing?’ ‘Great question,’ Obama replied.What else might he have been? A law ...”

“... the accusation of abandoning their allies in an hour of need … it didn’t matter if British power derived from the Americans; what mattered was that the British had power to wield, and [Fry] didn’t mind admitting that he rather enjoyed wielding it. For the top echelon of the British army, there was also the ...”

“... Turks of 1908, a complete nonsense. ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just now.’ Although ...”

“... he saw as her growing intolerance of views she didn’t share. Thatcher had used the extraordinary power possessed by a prime minister with a large majority in the Commons to see off her two most powerful ministers. But though she won the battle, she lost the war. Within a year Major, working in conjunction with the new foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, got her ...”

“... York Review of Books (15 January) Shaul Bakhash reported on the increased presence in Teheran of power centres, all of them vying for authority and for better positions in the coming battle for the succession. If we add to this the boasts that have emanated from Israel (Uri Lubrani, the man who supervised Israeli operations in Pahlavi Iran, and who remains ...”

“... coding skills for his intelligence work in China. He remained throughout Mao’s superior, with power of command over him.In 1930 regional tensions in the Red Army base area, over-determined by factional conflicts in the CCP as the Comintern changed its line on China, triggered violent purges of party fighters and militants, ordered or covered by Mao ...”

“... of sexual indiscretion in Washington, partly for his own prurient needs and partly for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as ...”

“... Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of ...”