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“... during the Second World War, overseeing the team that made the Normandy landings possible. More than a third of the book is taken up with Austin’s five years in the army, and with the achievements he never talked about, even to his wife. Rowe has produced a marvellous book, which manages to be both exhaustive and thoroughly absorbing. It ...”

“... have been forced over the last few years to recognise that Bentham’s idea of government was far more sophisticated than the particular pieces of legislation usually labelled Benthamite. Now a remarkably thorough investigation of his life and writings emphasises and develops what Keynes pointed out forty years ago: that there was much ...”

“... administration’s America First Energy Plan, which will increase US dependence on fossil fuels: more fracking, more coal-mining, more pipelines. There’s nothing to convince them of: nobody who has worked in the hydrocarbon business can be in any real doubt that carbon dioxide causes ...”

“... as it’s called in the UK – trails behind at about ten thousand copies a year, followed still more distantly by the two volumes of Glass family stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters. Lots of readers love Holden Caulfield but the Glass family fans, though fewer, are just as passionate. I read The Catcher in the Rye in high ...”

“... attack, we would see ‘again (with a vengeance) … how tenaciously Americans remember’ – or more to the point misremember – ‘that day of infamy’. Three months later, 9/11 gave us a Pearl Harbor redux far worse than Dower could have imagined. That politicians should draw an analogy between a surprise attack by four hijacked planes manned by 20 ...”

“... he was steadily building his sprawling dream house. The Story of San Michele is made up of 30-odd more or less free-standing chapters, though these loosely connected scenes from Munthe’s life are framed by an account of discovering, buying and rebuilding the villa on Capri. The Capri passages appear to be set in a continuous mythic present. ‘I sprang from ...”

“... Western Europe demonstrated against the deployment of Nato’s cruise missiles.2 On 12 June 1982, more than a million people assembled in Central Park in New York to call for a nuclear weapons freeze: ‘The gathering remains perhaps the largest political demonstration in a single locale in US history.’ Ronald Reagan was unpersuaded. On 8 March 1983, he ...”

“... bravery. Vasily Chuikov, the Soviet commander at Stalingrad, boasted that Pavlov’s men killed more German soldiers than died in the capture of Paris. The real Pavlov survived and proved his heretical credentials after the war by becoming an archimandrite in the Sergeyev Posad monastery outside Moscow. Grossman, who covered the battle of Stalingrad as a ...”

“... The English have never been unduly admiring of their own great men. All of Thomas Carlyle’s efforts failed to establish Oliver Cromwell securely in the Victorian pantheon. The names of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington summon up public houses rather than heroes. Winston Churchill in this century, like the Elder Pitt in the 18th and the Younger Pitt in the 19th, was buried with ceremony then swiftly consigned to history: which means that for the bulk of the population he became irrelevant ...”

“... and artisans set up shop there; carters delivered goods and made purchases en route to the more isolated villages on Salisbury Plain; inns catered for travellers and, more recently, for visitors to Stonehenge. I left my car near the less hospitable accommodation provided by the Blind House, the old parish lock-up, a ...”

“... clay pipes and gallons of port. In 1812 Murray II moved the firm to Albemarle Street in the more respectable West End, where it remained until the seventh John Murray sold up in 2002. Here Murray’s built a list that included some of the best and most popular authors of their day, from Byron and Walter Scott to Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Freya Stark. It ...”

“... no rights to. Labour contracts are relentless and demeaning. The market and the caste system keep more than half the population of Uttar Pradesh in a state of dire need.The families of the two girls managed to hold out against the police long enough for local reporters to arrive at the scene. The journalists took photographs and uploaded them to ...”

“... the following day, ‘his body was found intact and uninjured, still fully clothed and looking more like sleep than death.’ Across the bay, the Younger Pliny spent the rest of the day with his books, ‘as this was my reason for staying behind’. He had a bath, ate, tried to sleep. As the ground tremors got worse, he went outside with his mother and ...”

“... In​ their groundbreaking biography, published a decade ago, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell argued that the young John Milton was not, as he has often been portrayed, a born radical. Instead, they argued, before 1637 the young Milton was politically and religiously conservative, a member of the Church of England who supported the High Church reforms carried out by William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury ...”

“... narrator, Monsieur Songe, describes the process of taking up his pen yet again, and adding one more to an already considerable cavalcade of novels.* Then he crosses out the word ‘hateful’. And then he crosses out the word ‘harness’. Over on this side of the Channel, the native-born author John Braine chooses for his epigraph a snatch of ...”