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“... observed by satellites, have shrunk by 10 per cent since the late 1960s; the average sea level rose between 0.1 and 0.2 metres during the 20th century (as a result of a combination of the thermal expansion of the warmer oceans and the increased run-off of melt-water). The atmospheric concentration of co2 has increased by 31 per cent since 1750; the present ...”

“... its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it ...”

“... about the same, a little above three thousand. Two weeks later, when Trump was claiming in the Rose Garden that China and the WHO between them had raised the worldwide caseload by a factor of twenty, the number of dead in China had barely budged: the epidemic there was under control. In the US, more than 23,000 had perished. By the time of Azar’s address ...”

“... their say under the rubric ‘Forum’. As well as Foot, Harrisson and King-Hall, they included Richard Crossman, George Orwell and E.F. Schumacher. Garvin, who was fiercely pro-Churchill, wrote in his diary that these unwelcome contributors were ‘carpers, crabbers, grousers, disappointed prigs, pedants, muddlers, moonstruck dreamers … the people who ...”

“... football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every ...”

“... the parliament doors in November he was wearing a flak jacket under his coat, but it was a red rose, not an AK-47, that he flourished in front of him. Shevardnadze, tired and cynical but still wise, could have used gunmen to stop him but chose not to. All the same, the danger from Saakashvili’s other enemies is very far from over. He is going after the ...”

“... camera.’ Giorno remembered Warhol shooting ‘for about three hours, until 5 a.m., when the sun rose, all by himself’.‘Warhol always talked about his love of boredom,’ Gopnik writes. In Andy Warhol, a brief biography published in 2001, Wayne Koestenbaum describes him as having ‘learned to plumb boredom’s erotics’. Warhol professed to love TV ...”

“... the strategy backfired. Because the military profession was reserved to Mamluks, some of them rose to positions of great power and transcended their original ‘slave’ status, and a Mamluk elite eventually emerged. In 1250 it seized power in Egypt and Syria and established the Mamluk Sultanate, with its capital in Cairo. Later the Ottomans would recycle ...”

“... them. When he saw the ménage that Auden had established in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his ...”

“... Third Crusade to take back the Holy City, and Tyre became the base of its operations. Its leader, Richard Plantagenet, reoccupied Acre, executing prisoners and slaughtering its inhabitants. Jerusalem, however, could not be retaken. For the next seven hundred years, with the exception of one short-lived and inconsequential Crusader occupation, the city ...”

“... and enjoyment.’ Even had Vázquez written that Borges cried for merely two days and then rose on the third, I would not believe a word of it. Nor do I believe the account in James Woodall’s life of Borges, also published in 1996: ‘What happened is a matter for speculation. It seems probable that Georgie’s virginity ended with the predictable ...”

“... actually fell – a staggering feat: real wages declined for seven straight years – while they rose some 15 per cent in France and Britain, and between 25 and 35 per cent in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. With devaluation now barred, the Mediterranean countries are suffering a drastic loss of competitiveness that augurs ill for the whole southern tier ...”

“... of the poor and disadvantaged claiming housing benefit in expensive privately rented property rose. Many people who bought their council houses sold them on to private landlords, who rented them to people on housing benefit who couldn’t get a council house, at double or triple the levels of council rent.Right to Buy thus created an astonishing leak of ...”

“... to 1859, to crush Chechen resistance. When tsarism collapsed in the First World War, the Chechens rose up for their independence, and when the Second World War came, Stalin deported them en masse to Central Asia, where one out of every three died. Against this background, there was no chance that Chechens would submit to the Russian Federation that Yeltsin ...”

“... the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys had been counting on to turn things around, a drink called Iceland Moss, made of cocoa mixed with lichen, failed to find favour with the public.The ...”