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“... warmth. Because he had spent so much time in prison and then in New York, he had no set of close friends or trusted comrades. His judgment was also flawed; his initial sense that there was a new energy in Irish nationalism proved to be wrong.In 1907, politically and culturally, Dublin could just as easily have seemed what James Joyce called ‘a centre ...”

“... The plebiscite form asked for approval or disapproval of the 1946 NHS Act. The Lancet, which had close associations with the Labour Government, urged doctors to recognise that their ‘true interest, like that of the people, is in peace’. Clegg and the BMA asked for war. Bevan became utterly fed up and spoke of ‘a small body of politically poisoned ...”

“... and each clearly recognised elements of himself in the other. Their friendship, sometimes close and sometimes hanging by a thread, endured until Britten’s death in 1976. In his autobiography Tippett acknowledged that Britten had once proposed they go to bed together. Soden provides an unsparing account, including the forlorn detail that Britten ...”

“... in 1939 show him in a well-lit studio wearing what looks like a doctor’s white coat, sitting close to Wilma Javor, the young woman he is drawing. Clothed old men drawing naked young women are one of Picasso’s subjects, even though Picasso didn’t spend much time working that way; Matisse did. You could guess this – and also deduce that he sat ...”

“... the police chief, who’d argued against the concealed weapons bill and had supported a measure to close the town’s bars at 2.30 a.m. on weekdays and 3 a.m. at weekends (the owners of the Mug-Shot Saloon and the Wasilla Bar had given money to Palin’s campaign). City employees were forbidden by her to speak to the press, and during her first four months in ...”

“... Afghans and foreigners alike call Karzai the mayor of Kabul and Khalilzad the proconsul. Those close to both report that Karzai not only defers to Khalilzad but seeks his advice on all important issues. It was Khalilzad – American-educated and thoroughly naturalised – who introduced Karzai to the Washington establishment that would install him on his ...”

“... like a counterintelligence file: just what you’d expect from a half-century of facts gathered by close observation. In the file there is evidence aplenty for a contradiction at the heart of the elusive author: furious insistence (most of the time) on his right to be left alone, alternating unpredictably with emphatic public gestures and words demanding the ...”

“... in Williams’s later books too, and a tendency to dramatise worries about universal futility in close conjunction with worries about women and sex. Shields’s biography doesn’t leave much mystery around this sort of apposition (Williams was ‘traditionally minded’ when it came to gender roles and wasn’t happy when his department came under pressure ...”

“... Empire’. More remarkable still, Waugh found in Rossetti a dark predicament which sounded rather close to home: ‘the baffled and very tragic figure of an artist born into an age devoid of artistic standards’.Given that ‘very tragic’ plight, it may not be surprising that Waugh began his study with the observation that ‘there is singularly little fun ...”

“... justice’. He had recently stepped down as director of public prosecutions when his local MP, Frank Dobson, announced his retirement. Starmer entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well as a popular local doctor. He drank ...”

“... for conducting them on the telephone (on a ‘don’t ring me, I’ll ring you’ basis). Close friends – of whom he appears to have had few – describe how he would ‘burn people up’, overwhelming them with demands for attention and affection, beguiling them, and then, often without explanation or warning, cutting them off (he would do this ...”

“... full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader intoxicated with whisky than one like Blair, intoxicated with himself. 17 January. At the ...”

“... ambiguous legacies.The copper beech tree on which Lady Gregory’s guests carved their names is close by. You can just make out some of the initials: GBS, SOC, WBY, JBY, AE. ‘All/That comes of the best knit to the best,’ Yeats wrote in ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’. Lady Gregory, Yeats’s friend and collaborator, remains a heroic presence ...”

“... lay upon a grave, or bed’ then had to qualify that by writing: ‘(at least, some cold and close-built bower)’; in ‘The Fish’, when she wrote the words ‘his lower lip’, she had to wonder ‘if you could call it a lip’. Before she could allow the mountains in ‘Arrival at Santos’ to be ‘self-pitying’, she had to impose the words ...”

“... in this new vein. A group of natural philosophers on their way home from the Arctic Circle have a close encounter with a pair of vast Lockean-minded aliens who are on their own fact-finding mission to planet Earth. The question is whether the encounter of small with large will reveal anything of interest, or if aliens are merely a version of us, and here a ...”