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“... old magus, and Kelley as his unscrupulous deceiver and exploiter. He is described as a ‘grand Imposter’, an ‘egregious scoundrel’, and a ‘terrible zombie-like figure’. This last comment – the phrase is Edith Sitwell’s – glances at a ten-acious feature of the Kelley legend: it is said that he had no ears, having had them cut off in ...”

“... but the ship itself was realised by others. In Glasgow, John Robertson made the engine and David Napier the boiler, while John Wood in Port Glasgow built the wooden hull and installed the machinery. The result was a marvel, the prototype of a steamer fleet that would revolutionise travel on the Clyde by 1820, when two dozen of them sailed every day ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... to move the nations to ‘a new world order’ he intended to use the UN machinery to shape his grand design. Rumblings from the White House soon revealed a shift towards unilateralism. By November, the President began to express doubts that an economic embargo alone would secure full compliance with the Council’s resolutions. Instead, he implied, the ...”

“... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...”

“... crucially important defence portfolio in addition to the premiership, and gave foreign affairs to David Levy, who broke away from the Likud to join the One Israel alliance. A former construction worker of Moroccan origin, Levy speaks no English and it was no doubt thought that his notorious indolence would allow Barak the latitude he wanted to conduct his own ...”

“... should be ‘exaltation’, although it is hard to be sure. Referring to ‘the historian David Irving’ is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller. There were, I think, few ballpoint pens in 1940. On page 160 the idea that the USA passed straight from barbarism to decadence is praised as if it had been conceived by Muggeridge, instead of Oscar ...”

“... In 1851 Flaubert passed through Venice and heard a parrot in a gilt cage calling out over the Grand Canal like a gondolier. ‘Fà eh, capo die.’ Two years later he was in Trouville, lodging with a pharmacien; there was a parrot which screamed unceasingly ‘As-tu déjeuné, Jako?’ and ‘Cocu, mon petit coco!’ It also whistled ‘J’ai du bon ...”

“... it even if it is the size of a tablecloth.’ At the same time, the Zionist leaders, especially David Ben-Gurion, were adept at presenting the Palestinian position as unreasonable. It is not that they weren’t interested in a compromise solution. But since the claims of the two sides could not be reconciled, it was preferable to have the Palestinians ...”

“... and rode to the rescue of the working miners like knights to maidens in distress. One of these was David Hart, a former property magnate and bankrupt, who had recovered and lived in grand style, country-squiring, looking for a safe Tory seat and writing novels. Hart was deeply attached to Thatcher and to MacGregor, whom he ...”

“... disciplines of sociology, social psychology, clinical psychology and anthropology. The resident grand maître in anthropology was Clyde Kluckhohn, who, in a manner characteristic of early Cold War imperial America, presided over two huge research projects. One was the comparative study of values in five adjacent, mostly colonised, cultures in the North ...”

“... he was more robust than Mr Earbrass. His ‘meticulous’ art boards, the production editor David Hough recalled, did not need editing and suggestions were not welcome. There was he said, ‘a bit of a ruckus’ over the hyphen in The Haunted Tea-Cosy.By 1963, successive changes of job and imprint had left Gorey stranded as an unhappy employee of ...”

“... programmers. The first chess-playing program was written on slips of paper by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in the late 1940s. At the time, it was easy to think that a computer capable of playing a decent game would require a kind of general reasoning capacity, that it might need to make logical deductions, think strategically and learn abstract ...”

“... wave of militancy among agricultural workers erupted into a harvest-time strike at Rudston Farm. David Holtby could afford the wage increases: it was the Saturday half-day that he couldn’t stomach. Baffled and defeated, he threw in his hand and sold the farm. Winifred came back from the war to find her parents living in wealthy suburban Cottingham, on the ...”

“... into a network of encounters with others. To this end, O’Hara even conceives of himself as Grand Central Station: ‘if they are not thundering into me/they are thundering across me … On rainy days I ache as if a train/were about to arrive, I switch my tracks.’ His own Dejection Ode is the subtle and painful poem ‘Essay on Style’, in which he ...”