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“... like the late CIA chief William Casey. There is a chilling sighting of Calley’s comrade Vernado Simpson, who went to Vietnam a 19-year-old, and perpetrated 25 of the killings in My Lai less than four months later. He didn’t just despatch his victims, who included women and children: he also scalped them, and removed their tongues, ears and hands. In ...”

“... in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate ...”

“... As John Berryman​ tells it, in a Paris Review interview conducted in 1970, he was walking to a bar in Minneapolis one evening in the mid-1950s with his second wife, Anne, the two of them joking back and forth, when Berryman volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable ...”

“... Socialist candidate for the governorship of California, Alice Warfield Mien (mother of Wallis Simpson) and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, grande dame of Washington dynastic bitchery. (She had a motto emblazoned on her sofa-cushion in Georgetown: ‘If you can’t think of anything nice to say about anybody, come and sit by me.’) A clutch of Supreme Court ...”

“... photographs were syndicated around the world. And Norman Mailer later wrote the book. When O.J. Simpson wanted to tell the world of his innocence, and the globe’s media scratched at the door, there was only one man with the skill to breeze into his cell. Lawrence Schiller came in with his beard, his anxiety and his notepad, and he helped ...”

“... is that evolution occurs at a rate which is not only ‘gradual’ but uniform. Yet George Gaylord Simpson, one of the main architects of the ‘modern synthesis’ now under attack, wrote a book, Tempo and Mode in Evolution, devoted to emphasising the great variability of evolutionary rates. It has never been part of the modern synthesis that evolutionary ...”

“... and she chafed against the lot which compelled her to watch her menfolk destroying wild life. John Gore, in his life of George V, suggested that her intellectual life might have been starved and her energies atrophied in those early years. George was not a man who lightly opened a book, other than a stamp album, but his bride read to him at ...”

“... TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail processing ...”

“... that day at the crimes of England and her associated military reprobates. One who did so was Major John C. Spahr, an executive officer with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323, based at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, but serving during the spring of 2005 in the Persian Gulf on the USS Carl Vinson. Major Spahr was 6 feet 3 inches tall and did a ...”

“... of Nations. It is the price of a useful and virtuous existence, of influence and undying fame. John Home’s History of the Rebellion of 1745 was not published until 1802, so Smith may not have seen it (though I bet he did). It contains an account of the meeting between Lochiel and Charles Edward at MacDonald of Boradale’s. Lochiel argued long and hard ...”

“... In John Lanchester’s novel Mr Phillips, the hero, a newly redundant accountant, is taken hostage during a bank robbery. Lying face down on the ground, he passes the time rehearsing a conversation he’d had with his former colleagues about the statistics of the National Lottery. The chance of winning is about one in fourteen million, which is much lower than the risk of dying before the week’s lottery is drawn ...”

“... proverb that says: ‘There is an exception to every rule.’ The editor of this dictionary, J.A. Simpson, does well to introduce the caveat by which he speaks of ‘seemingly contradictory proverbs’. For ‘Many hands make light work’ is not countered by any proverb which says ‘Many hands do not make light work,’ but by ‘Too many cooks spoil the ...”

“... he entirely understands. This is from 1997: After a White House parley, he had asked Senator Alan Simpson in confidence whether Republican strategists really believed the Clintons did something terrible in Whitewater, like theft or perjury. He mimicked the hearty response. ‘Oh, hell no,’ cried Simpson. ‘But our goal ...”

“... into terrible atrocities. My Lai happened because officers failed.’ Another Marine, Captain John McNamara, wrote home in 1967 that he was appalled by the loose talk he heard among his fellow officers about the need to employ terrorist tactics against terrorists: ‘Just a few years ago it was confined to the fringe. If the actual [US ...”

“... Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis. Mr Morrison claims to have eschewed gossip and attended instead to such questions as: ‘Did the writers know each other? Is there any evidence of ...”