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“... sunny clearings in the midst of impenetrable gloom. Before his humble ghost alerts the men in white coats, however, perhaps I should move on. One of Wilamowitz’s criticisms was that Burckhardt was at least fifty years out of date, and fifty years later Arnaldo Momigliano was still blaming him for breathing new life into the already elderly notion of ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”

“... each other. Birt’s first innovation was ‘producer choice’ (recommended by a Major government White Paper in 1992), which required BBC resource departments to charge producers the ‘real’ costs of their services, giving producers the complementary right to shop where they liked. This reform propelled cost-conscious producers into W.H. Smith, where ...”

“... a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers ...”

“... As the machines which Turing had designed at Bletchley, originally with Dilwyn Knox and Peter Twinn, were standardised and their development became a routine, he turned to the third area of his achievement: the conception of a general-purpose machine, more precisely of an automatic electronic digital computer with internal storage programme. In ...”

“... will be curable in the context of our boundless longevity?When do you stop being who you are?For Peter Pan, death was an awfully big adventure. For Saul Bellow, it was the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.‘Nothing good ever really dies,’ a middle-aged man told me in the drinks queue at Abba Voyage in Stratford. ‘It just ...”

“... who end up abroad in flight from their creditors, the appalling shits who go off to do white mischief in the Kenyan highlands, the paranoid eccentrics who embrace ridiculous or distasteful political crusades, the pompous proconsuls who deceive themselves into mistaking the trappings for the power, and the deference-hungry nonentities who clutch at ...”

“... which his authors draw between their conventional, bourgeois wives, asexual, pure, anonymous, ‘white’, and the raging, shrieking, demonic, castrating ‘red’ whores whom they see on the side of their opponents, seems to Theweleit but a colourful exaggeration of the paler dichotomies common in the conventional perceptions of women by men in ...”

“... but he pulled no more steadily than Anthony Burgess. His wife Lynne knocked back two bottles of white wine and a pint of gin daily, and his intake seems to have been equal though not identical. The wonder is not that Lynne died but that her husband survived. When suffering from dyspepsia he tried to reach crisis point via a midnight supper of cold ...”

“... VIP paedophile rings. It went big on ‘Pizzagate’, the bogus 2016 conspiracy theory spread by white supremacists proposing that the Democratic Party was concealing child abuse by senior officials. That’s not to suggest paedophile rings don’t exist, but you need to be careful about the way such allegations can be made to appear instantly substantial by ...”

“... recalling Caspar David Friedrich’s The Chasseur in the Forest, Kiefer paints himself in a white gown, holding a burning branch in a thick forest, the oil layered and dripping as if the work was itself the outcome of a pagan rite. With Kiefer there is always a sense of meanings lurking just beneath the surface, of barely hidden taboos. Four paintings ...”

“... the protagonist of upward mobility in the 1930s: a young, cultured, working-class man in a white shirt, suit and tie, cultivating the manners of the new establishment, writing about Tchaikovsky and reciting Heine. ‘I feel,’ the young Potemkin wrote, ‘that I will (one day) stand before the court of society, where the details of my life will be ...”

“... or whether life forms actually died out. Because of accidents of preservation, fossils tend to peter out slowly in any strata sequence, with the result that the general record suggests the gradual disappearance of species rather than sudden extinction. Only by carrying out a dogged search close to the boundary can the final disappearance of a species be ...”

“... on this issue. The truth lies with the Argentinian assertion that if a flag, light blue and white, is to be struck in Port Stanley to make way for the Union Jack, it will be the Latin American flag, not just the Argentinian, that is hauled down. For a South American state to victual the Malvinas would be tantamount to handling the most politically ...”

“... of the CIA, William Casey. Casey and the gang of right-wing fanatics he quickly promoted to the White House were obsessed with the clandestine. They didn’t think much of elected politicians, and preferred to carry out their policies behind the backs of Congress and the Senate. For them, the Iran-Iraq war held out glorious opportunities for covert ...”