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“... grudges, he now sometimes takes part in respectful online discussions with former enemies such as John McDonnell, who stood against him for the Labour leadership in 2007. This relatively short biography devotes four chapters to Brown’s life after Downing Street. Here, as throughout the book, the tone is occasionally critical but essentially ...”

“... have Jesse Jackson like we’re gonna have here.’ I asked how the funding worked. ‘Well, Washington has this idea that democracy is something you can sorta buy. They say: will it be free and fair? If we say no, not really, they say: well how much more do we have to allocate to get it free and fair?’ I was called to the phone. It was my ...”

“... Revolution (1990), found Cairo University records giving Arafat’s birthplace as Cairo. Janet and John Wallach, who wrote Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder (1990), came up with his Egyptian birth certificate. Arafat shrugged off the disclosure. Said Aburish, a Palestinian whose biography is the best available in English, sympathises with Arafat’s original ...”

“... going on’, 1914 wiped out any ambivalence. The immensely popular Inside Europe (1940) of John Gunther summarised feelings on this side of the Atlantic: ‘It is an intolerable affront to human and political nature that these wretched and unhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and do, have quarrels that cause world wars. Some hundred ...”

“... pop shrinks call ‘transference’. But there is a limit, imposed by the tradition of New York-Washington ‘objectivity’, on his willingness to call things by their right names. It became very plain to me, as I finished the book, that if I were to employ the argot of popular psychology I could say that I had been reading the profile of a serial ...”

“... presidential and foreign ministry archives, and other archives in Albania, Bulgaria, London and Washington DC. They even tried – and failed – to get access to the Chinese war memorial in Pyongyang.The book cites by name 363 interviewees in 38 countries, including two former US presidents; Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore; the ...”

“... as an intermittent reminder. The Times speculation was prompted by an earlier report in the Washington Post: Kushner wanted special Russian facilities to prevent intrusion by US intelligence, in order to conduct transitional discussions with Russia. A strategic misfire on Kushner’s part; but no less questionable was the assumption guiding the ...”

“... apartheid’.A. Philip Randolph, the Black labour leader and civil rights activist, described Washington DC as not only the capital of the United States but also the capital of ‘Dixie’. Roosevelt and Congress were largely indifferent to Black demands for equality in the army and civilian life. While Blacks were fighting for the Double V, the federal ...”

“... became an instrument of it, a convenient façade for military and political operations run by Washington around the world, from Korea to the Congo, down to the current blockades of Iran and the DPRK. Truman is praised for the creation of Nato and the launching of the Marshall Plan, as respectively defensive and constructive contributions to postwar ...”

“... though the OSCE said that the election had generally been ‘well conducted’.) After a visit to Washington in March 1997, Đukanović presented himself as a knight-errant willing to defend human rights against ‘ancient hatreds’. Over the coming years, he pushed a version of Montenegrin identity based on civic, not ethnic, grounds. He rolled out the ...”

“... sex or ability, they came and went when they chose, working-class mothers were admirably assisted. John Pounds, a crippled Portsmouth cobbler, ran one such, carrying on his trade while his pupils did the work he set them. A visitor suggested that he needed some new books – ‘those under that birdcage seem to be coming to pieces.’ Pounds: ‘So much the ...”

“... the US ‘on the path to World War Three’. Corker is one of a handful of Republicans, along with John McCain and Jeff Flake, who now seem more afraid of what Trump might do to the world than of what he might do to them. What sort of war does Trump risk detonating? The most frightening scenario is war between ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘the Dotard’ (as Kim ...”

“... Post Review of 1945) and ‘get a life’ (which it’s hard to believe wasn’t used before the Washington Post of 23 January 1983). ‘Sayings’ occupy the indefinable hinterland between proverbs and the kind of thing usually called ‘quotations’, which are remarks like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George ...”

“... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...”

“... Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory worker in Kharkov who ...”