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“... should express no opinion on this issue, and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasise this instruction. Even as the latest in ‘smart’ technology grinds and punctures the Iraqi military, this amazingly explicit enticement to Saddam is still being debated. Did the United States intend to ...”

“... was in the middle of a recession and Parliament didn’t spend much time on Crossrail. As Sir George Young, the MP for Ealing (and Leader of the House from 2010 until Cameron’s recent reshuffle), put it, ‘the report is conducted in a financial vacuum.’ Young joked that, since Barran’s Crossrail tunnel passed under Buckingham Palace, the queen ...”

“... review, signing a letter to Van Vechten, ‘Yours, for further violation of hospitality, or as George Gershwin (wasn’t it) put it Do it again.’ The ethnography of Harlem in Van Vechten’s daybooks is more valuable than the fiction he produced. Recording feuds, trysts and hangovers, they also provide the most detailed account we have of Larsen’s life ...”

“... nor was he tempted four years later, when he had a clear lead over his anti-war challenger George McGovern. Only in 1976 – when Nixon’s post-resignation successor Gerald Ford found himself languishing 33 points behind the challenger, Jimmy Carter – did an incumbent president have sufficient incentive to address the limitations of the 1934 ...”

“... on TV. I can remember a time when ursine influencers were reliably geezerish, like Hofmeister’s George in his pork-pie hat and yellow satin jacket (‘For a great lager, follow the bear’). But cuddliness resumed in the 1990s, in successive Coca-Cola Christmas campaigns, and hasn’t let up since. Bears distribute their weight towards their hind legs, and ...”

“... On​ 9 June 2020, two weeks after the murder of George Floyd, a photograph appeared on my Twitter feed of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. She was wearing a stole made of Ghanaian Kente cloth, its bold yellow and black geometric design set off by her red suit and heels. She was surrounded by a group of Democratic congressmen and women, including Chuck Schumer and Kamala Harris, all similarly dressed and looking, as one commentator put it, like a Wakandan chess set ...”

“... with jottings and sketches. The fullest notes are for his last incomplete novel, Denis Duval. George Eliot seems to have begun making her collections of notes, or quarries, for novels with her third full-length work, Romola. Charles Reade began to rely on his system of note-making with his third novel, It is never too late to mend. Trollope claimed not to ...”

“... Reagan’s). The lineage of many of the most powerful figures in America today – Dick Cheney, George Bush, John Roberts, Samuel Alito – can be traced back through the Reagan administration. Conservatives disaffected with Bush accuse him of the worst sin they can imagine: betraying Reagan’s legacy. Even Democrats have forgotten the harsh feelings they ...”

“... Guard deodorant. A small shampoo bottle. A map of London. A birth certificate with the name Ramon George Sneyd. Two bars of soap. Sixty British pounds in five-pound notes. Hair pomade. A paperback novel titled The Ninth Directive. Shaving cream. Another paperback novel, quite worn, titled Tangier Assignment. A toothbrush. A book titled Psycho-Cybernetics. An ...”

“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”

“... up a conversation with one of its writers, Michael O’Donoghue, who suggested she meet his friend George Trow, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Trow organised a lunch with Kincaid and William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker, at the Algonquin. Kincaid ordered the most expensive item on the menu – a seafood salad – while Shawn had a bowl of cornflakes ...”

“... Diana Ross, on her way to Paris to make a ‘highly personal’ (auteuriste?) film about Josephine Baker, was asked if she was going to write the script herself: someone else, she trilled, would have to do ‘the paperwork’. Meryl Streep spoke glowingly of sticking to the text when they filmed The French Lieutenant’s Woman from Harold Pinter’s script. I ...”

“... had chosen to build up Iraq as part of a divide-and-rule strategy in the Gulf; that he and James Baker had knowingly protected the banks, businesses and departments of state which financed the great Ba’athist rearmament, and that (perhaps worst of all) the time of closest military and intelligence collusion had coincided with Baghdad’s gruesome ...”

“... the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, but ‘can’t regret the decision to go to war’. George W. Bush was ‘a true idealist’. Even Silvio Berlusconi comes in for praise. Blair did, however, lambast himself for one decision made in office:Freedom of Information. Three harmless words. I look at those words as I write them, and feel like shaking my ...”

“... off with a selection from Glamorous Night. Then, having played themselves in, they accompany Uncle George, my father’s brother, in some songs. Uncle George is a bricklayer and has a fine voice and a face as red as his bricks. He sings ‘Bless this house’ and ‘Where’er you walk’ and sometimes Grandma has a little ...”