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“... tarmac of derelict streets. The sandpiper isn’t a creature of asphalt and paving. It’s a small white-breasted bird usually to be found foraging on British foreshores in groups of twenty or so, scuttling up and down sandy beaches as the foaming forward edge of the sea roars in and hisses back. I’d come to Grimsby to see why, after seventy years of voting ...”

“... disappearing all over the city, none more shockingly than Pennsylvania Station, a McKim, Meade and White structure as imposing as the Colosseum. It disappeared the year Liebling died, and the Women’s House of Detention was demolished at last in 1974. Mitchell involved himself in many of these battles which were mostly won by ‘the god damn sons of ...”

“... started being driven to the Bois as well as back.’ (Similarly, his idea of dieting was drinking white wine rather than red at lunch.) On the major policy question, he took the debatable view that ‘monetary union is more likely to be the cause of economic convergence than the result of it,’ and pressed for this. But all the while he was still brooding on ...”

“... one wants to cry just thinking about him – playing tennis in newly-pressed flannels, snowy white sneakers and ‘spotless’ T-shirt, Costello is a sort of teenage Lohengrin – she reunites deserted wife with errant husband. Though Magda’s return to Smith shatters Costello – she leaves town without warning – we must assume it gives both her and ...”

“... and West and multicultural England is described by Jusserand as the ‘meeting of the waters’, Norman, Saxon and Dane coming together so that ‘England is now “merrie England”, bursting with life and vigour’. In Italy, according to the Fortnightly Review in 1902, the waters were meeting but failing to mingle, as if at the confluence of the Rhone and ...”

“... in the Palestinian case, a homeland for the resolution of its exile since 1948. But, as Hayden White has noted in a seminal article, ‘narrative in general, from the folk tale to the novel, from annals to the fully realised “history”, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.’1 Now there are numerous UN ...”

“... the ‘pornography of despair’, art-internationalism, on Serota and Saatchi and Norman Rosenthal and the Turner Prize, on new hyped foreign painting (Schnabel and the Italian Transavantgardia), on the so-called ‘Neo-Geo’ movement from New York (being collected by Saatchi), on the British ‘new object’ sculptors (also collected by ...”

“... side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however infallible, will only go so far; while on the other, the lights of the New Criterion or Public Interest shine brighter in the reputable British mirror than they do more nakedly at home. The result is a formula that makes for a livelier ...”

“... memoir into an exquisitely private, vulnerable space, moving it away from the public territory of Norman Mailer’s 1968 The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History. The voice is distant but not disembodied. It is strung-out, staccato, impatient. There is no time here for soft memory, easy noticing or obvious emotion. Feeling is buried in ...”

“... put this together. And now she was going to be gone.’ Some of Bush’s generals were blunter. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the US forces, accosted his British counterpart, General de la Billière: ‘Hey Peter, what sort of country have you got there when they sack the prime minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very ...”

“... first time I went there, I could see a major divide between their side and ours. Most of them were white, religious and from outside the city; we were a multi-ethnic, New York City-based, progressive group. Every Saturday, the anti-choice group parked a van in front of the abortion clinic, and laid a row of pre-printed signs and images on the sidewalk. Our ...”

“... Birmingham. Fewer than half of its 350,000 citizens described themselves in the last census as ‘white British’. A third are foreign-born. It has almost as many Hindus as Muslims, and the irreligious are a larger group than the believers in any one of the big religions. All three of its MPs are Labour, among them Jon Ashworth, the shadow health ...”

“... to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential science adviser out of the cabinet – an effective and still ...”

“... point. Schröder’s appeal, pitched expressly to ‘the New Middle’, proved most effective with white-collar employees, where the SPD gained 6 per cent nationwide, and pulled over significant numbers of the self-employed, some of them former Green supporters. There was little gender variance in the vote, with the exception of young women under 24, who went ...”

“... not where it should be,’ he kept saying. We eventually found the church, which had a Norman nave and was therefore unlikely to have moved since the Ordnance Survey landed its symbol on the Landranger map.Thinking back on this, I wonder whether my father was already in the early stages of dementia. He was only in his mid-fifties, and it was a ...”