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“... took a new young wife. On one visit to the South of France, Michael met an unfamiliar young woman wearing a sun tan and one of Alex’s cream silk shirts. She was Alexa Boycun, a Canadian. Later on, Michael guessed that she had come into his uncle’s view as a sultry model in some pin-up pictures taken by one of his many Hungarian hangers on. Alex was in his ...”

“... we passed two cows on the motorway verge, herded by two women in drab coats and headscarves, wearing boots and talking hard to each other. Road-signs pointed to Kharkov and other places I remember from the war maps on which my brother and I drew red arrows in 1942 to plot the Nazi Army’s push for the Baku oilfields. One of the last trucks I saw before ...”

“... got a First. It wasn’t an official degree, since Oxford didn’t yet allow women to graduate. (Wearing university gowns to underline this injustice was to become a central element of suffragette demonstrations.) She was praised by her tutor as ‘industrious and painstaking’. She began teaching and writing plays and journalism in London, and in 1906 ...”

“... In this light, almost anything a woman does can be seen as empowering, if not subversive – wearing a chador or going topless, having a facelift or embracing one’s inner crone, becoming a nun or joining the Klan. The corset – fascinating, alluring, enraging – has been a beneficiary of this revisionism. In the standard view, shaped by 19th-century ...”

“... found out my mother was going to marry my father, she asked my mother to reconsider. ‘What about David?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to marry David instead?’ David is my father’s brother. He still lives alone in the council house my grandmother died in. He used to hear ...”

“... In the piece by David Bell elsewhere in this issue, a number of lines from an 18th-century French poem are quoted fearlessly in the original. At one time, the question of whether or not to translate them would never have arisen, the editors of a paper like this assuming that a sufficiently high proportion of its readers were comfortable with French for a translation to be both patronising and redundant ...”

“... everyone else in his world is a doll; the whole population is represented by stiff-limbed, mask-wearing puppets with disproportionately sized heads. Would they be human if they could? Are they human enough already? The masks are especially important because they display rather than disguise an aspect of the film’s creation. In so-called replacement ...”

“... what they want, a Democrat has to: that was his line. Hillary Clinton also backed the generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the chief of staff Admiral Mullen, in their request for 40,000 more troops. Indeed she supported them more strongly than Gates did. Jones sought to help Obama by running interference with the Pentagon, but Obama preferred ...”

“... succession to Arakcheev, with orders to modernise the Russian Army. The entente with Napoleon was wearing decidedly thin. The next five years brought a series of peaks and lows in Barclay’s career. As an administrator, he proved his worth in Finland and then in the Ministry of War. He increased the size of the Army, modernised its organisation, improved its ...”

“... row of brass buttons.’ In England, Thackeray declared, people would undoubtedly address a boy wearing such a jacket as ‘Buttons’. He may well have been thinking of Buttons the page in the pantomime version of Cinderella. In America, too, the pages or ‘call boys’ whose instant availability was crucial to the smooth functioning of office ...”

“... It sounds a lot more like 1995 than 2025. And even in 1985 Thatcher wasn’t much to be seen wearing boots with laces. The effect is to make the new book appear even more nostalgic than its predecessor. Ironically, it draws on the age of politics that put paid to the era for which A Very British Coup was still holding a flame. Thompson is not exactly ...”

“... foreign officials who stay there. The Englishman finds the relentless soliciting uncongenial and wearing, and asks his employers to put him up in a house. This they duly do: he shares a pleasant house in a suburb with a colleague; the oil company lays on a car and driver to transport them the few miles to the city-centre office each day. The one problem is ...”

“... jolly television games-player (yes, Arthur Marshall); another, who served in Intelligence, took to wearing bangles and a large diamond in one ear, and was barred from Wimbledon for designing too-saucy dresses for tennis women (Teddy Tinling); a third, who rose from private in the Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer ...”

“... look into a dark and very ancient stone chamber where there is a teenage girl of exquisite beauty, wearing white satin and kneeling upon a velvet cushion, blindfold. She is supported, tenderly, by a gentleman in a black cloak and looked on by a large man in red tights who holds an axe. In front of her, between her and us, there is a wooden block surrounded by ...”

“... stance at the podium contrasted with Kennedy’s relaxed style. Not knowing that Kennedy was wearing foundation, Nixon refused make-up. Even his suit let him down: the painted studio set had dried much lighter than expected, so that the dark-suited Kennedy stood out, while Nixon, in a light suit, seemed to blend into the background. Kennedy did have his ...”