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“... disasters, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s diligent gofer, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds as high-ups in British intelligence, all candidates for the ultimately declared position of mole – and the director’s elegant hand is everywhere. Tomas Alfredson is best known for his bleak vampire movie Let the Right One In, and ...”

“... an extended stay in Rome, and they journeyed in pursuit of many things including but by no means limited to erudition and social polish. Their owners had consigned to the Westmorland a variety of objects: prints and paintings, guidebooks, marbles, architectural designs, fans, lumps of Vesuvian lava, sheet music, a copy of Tristram Shandy, as well as ...”

“... fierce polemics of the time – ‘urban v. anti-urban, romantic v. rationalist, and traditional means of building v. high technology’ – made for a more critical discourse on architecture than ever before. At the end, Jones and Woodward expressed the hope that ‘respect for London’s architectural traditions’ would define the new moment. Thirty years ...”

“... it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.’ In a similar mood, David Thomson published a biography in which every chapter ends with a dialogue of self-examination by the critic, and in which Welles’s best-known innovation is side-swiped and helped to its feet all in the course of a sentence: ‘In truth, there was more ...”

“... upbringing (‘We were Methodist,’ she liked to say of her Grantham childhood, ‘and Methodist means method’) and partly down to her training as a chemist at Oxford – she was much more proud of being the first prime minister with a science degree than she was to be the first woman prime minister – and then as a barrister. But it was also a matter of ...”

“... and cities, supporting 1400 projects, far more than any other country in Europe. According to David Mackay, a former officer in the Parachute Regiment who was project manager of the Glasgow CityWatch CCTV system for two years, ‘so positive has central government support been that, by 1997, the bulk of Home Office expenditure on crime prevention was ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... Early on, Jones mounts a pre-emptive defence against an accusation he knows is coming. When David Aaronovitch smarmily remarks, one Oxbridge-educated staff journalist to another, ‘here we are, having our elite discussion,’ Jones tells the reader: ‘Some will claim that I am, myself, a member of the establishment. But it is not someone’s ...”

“... as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the ...”

“... into infighting and persistent one-upmanship. His love life was an extension of politics by other means.What he longed for was the perfect prince. He spent his life looking for a true ‘gentleman’ politician to whom he could offer his services. He thought he had found one in Nelson Rockefeller, the New York governor, his first big political ...”

“... Israel decided to stop Gaza’s electricity for a few hours a day. Despite the fact that this means, for instance, that electricity will fail to reach hospitals, it was said that ‘the Israeli government decided to approve this step, as another non-lethal weapon.’ Another thing the soldiers do is clearing – khisuf. In regular Hebrew, khisuf ...”

“... to such ideas as God and Satan, good and evil, faith and reason, freedom and fate. By means of such systems, contradictory absolutes can be fitted to the otherwise intractable realities of everyday life. Accordingly, distance from the ‘centre’ means estrangement from what is conventionally understood as ...”

“... suggest. One of its products is the kind of wildly inconsistent rhetoric dissected by David Bromwich in Politics by Other Means: the insistence that you are only an authentic black if you identify your self with your blackness, only an authentic gay if you identify your self with your gayness, etc. Another is ...”

“... becomes a ‘wasm’, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means nothing, although there are probably one or two European politicians who think it has something to do with being rude to foreigners at conferences. True, in some other countries, but not in Germany or Japan, or not for long, New Right ideology has been ...”

“... the American method of teaching history, and not least their own history, coupled with the by no means uncommon requirement that students purchase copies of designated books, that has generated such an enormous demand for the general text, a demand which American historians and publishers alike have long been eager to satisfy. This is a perfectly respectable ...”