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“... free Poland. ‘To a large degree, Lithuania is a continuation of Poland,’ he wrote, but ‘the best plan with Poland is to ensure free development to the Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Jews, and to do away with the great advantage of one people over another.’ A federation, an association of independent nations or a single state with self-governing ...”

“... advertisement just to have a laugh. But he could have gone further.We know Ignatius Gallaher best from the story ‘A Little Cloud’ in Dubliners. He is a journalist in London back in Dublin for a brief visit. Gallaher is unmarried, he has a ‘travelled air, well-cut tweed suit and fearless accent’. He wears ‘a vivid orange tie’, calls the Dublin ...”

“... decision-making in certain circumstances that it was partly a case of government knowing what was best, but it wasn’t just that: ‘If we were to lay specifically our thought processes before you,’ he added, ‘they are not just going before you; they are laid before a worldwide range of uncomprehending or malicious commentators.’ This is the point. A ...”

“... very absoluteness of the Cold War borders left a whole series of chinks and crevices. Some of the best were in Berlin, naturally. There was a whole archipelago of tiny islets of West Berlin territory floating offshore in East Germany, connected to their mainland by barbed-wire causeways. There were also places in what had been the city centre where the Wall ...”

“... Determined not to be taken in again, he was aggressively on guard against some of his own best instincts. There was, too, a genuine problem of category. Was Peterley Harvest a novel autobiography or an autobiographical novel? And does it matter whether the book is a memoir or fiction or an ingenious amalgam of the two? Short of the Hitler ...”

“... favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind the Balfour Declaration, both Balfour and Lloyd George became committed believers in the Zionist cause. Again, this was no obvious manifestation of ...”

“... as well as its other major towns. It was an unprovoked attack, justified on spurious grounds: Tsar Nicholas I claimed that more than ten million Orthodox Christians were imperilled by the indifference and barbarism of their Ottoman overlords. Russia asserted a historic right and duty to protect these people, though the vast majority had expressed no interest ...”

“... that ‘Marvell’s prose was at least as important to civilisation as his poetry.’ In 2005 Nicholas von Maltzahn’s An Andrew Marvell Chronology, an essential handbook, brought the often murky or recalcitrant biographical materials to order and gave us the first rounded picture of his literary and political career. Not that Marvell will ever be easy ...”

“... which is currently showcasing the Stockists and their polemic exhibition, The Resignation of Sir Nicholas Serota. There are no other browsers when I visit the place, but the custodian is babbling on the phone: ‘It was a very cheap way to do up this building which was redundant.’ Drummond, responding to the requirement to ...”

“... the Carl Vinson: ‘There goes Dukes,’ said one of them whom I later spoke to. ‘He was the best Top Gun pilot of his generation, and what I would call a complete man,’ he said. I looked at hundreds of pictures of John Spahr over the months I spent looking for his story. Many of them showed him in the cockpit of his fighter plane: one with his visor ...”

“... of Sarah Andrew. Such episodes, taken from local archives and legal records, are among the best things in the book, though part of the latter story was already in Cross and most of it in Dudden. Nevertheless, they have a fresh factual tang, sometimes marred by low-grade psychologising, as in the parenthetical suggestion that ‘psychologists would say ...”

“... battle-lines are not too clearly drawn. You can make lists. In favour of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or ...”

“... guilt. This development has been intelligibly contested by advocates of civil liberties, but its best justification is that it probably does no more than corral within safe bounds something that the common sense of juries has always led them to do. Meanwhile, still writing on the blank sheet, one would have to turn to things the accused himself has said ...”

“... constitutes almost an alternative story. In the first place, Porter’s title is descriptive at best of the past 150 years of a 2500-year-long story, and arguably of only the past 60 or so. Before the middle of the 19th century, clinical medicine had almost no beneficent impact on health and may well have caused more harm than good; doctors at the Battles ...”

“... he was his own boss, he threw himself into the pursuit, practising every day and seeking out the best opponents. He was a prince of exuberant physical energy, and had the height and weight to succeed at a sport so expensive and dangerous that it was still thought valid preparation for the battlefield. In jousting it’s only with a well-matched opponent that ...”