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“... old toy rifle. Amanda had flown with Abhay to Bombay, but couldn’t take India and went straight home again. Her rejection of the country can be seen as a starting-point for the whole train of events; except that there are any number of other starting points to choose from. In any case it’s not a train of events so much as a tangle – like the Gordian ...”

“... they scoffed, rolling their eyes at me. Just like her dad, like George Harrison. My Sweet Lord.’ The girls cling on desperately to bits of culture, fashion, pop, but they have the sense that it’s all passing them by, like life itself. Humiliation and conventionality and passivity and banality are inculcated into Jane, even by something as trivial ...”

“... when the NHS speech therapist to whom I had been referred told me she was returning to the family home in Greece where she and her father, a retired sea captain, keep bees. But, on reflection, there seemed no reason not to continue our weekly half-hour sessions using Zoom or Skype, and it has been working out well. If I describe it here, it’s not to support ...”

“... in 1973, and Iraq to invade Iran in 1980, and sold arms on the quiet to both sides throughout. As Lord Copper once put it, ‘the Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere. Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.’ Considerations of this kind tend to be forgotten once war begins, but one ...”

“... in showing that this was certainly not always true. She begins her book with Edward Barlow leaving home in Lancashire in 1657 to go and be a sailor, and years later drawing a picture of the parting in his diary, with his mother beckoning to him to stay. So much for Stone. But if parental emotions are still allowed, or not altogether disproved, do the ...”

“... out to explain why Keynes out of any number of ‘solutions’ should finally have lighted upon ‘home development’ (state-financed capital development), how an apparent ‘gap’ between savings and investment could satisfactorily be explained, and how wage-stickiness, which had originally been seen as a kind of social maladjustment, became in The General ...”

“... that Golding had won the Nobel Prize Faber arranged for me to meet him and Mrs Golding at their home in Wiltshire. I took to them both and agreed to help. Faber nervously brought up the ‘question of, uh, recompense’, but I, foolish Egyptian, waved it aside: it was a gift.I spoke to my brother, about whom a couple of words are now necessary. Ala is an ...”

“... economic and cultural mark: they founded Goethe and Schiller societies, became magistrates and Lord Mayors and were the main force behind the formation of the Halle Orchestra. Charles Halle himself was a refugee from revolution, fleeing to England to escape ‘the juggernaut of Republicanism’. Life was much more awkward for the small group who form Dr ...”

“... regularly work nights are pale, bad-tempered and die of coronaries in their fifties. Bush House, home of the BBC World Service, is full of thirty and forty-year-olds doing night-shifts. Mine is aimed at producing a programme called Newshour which is broadcast live at five in the morning. The preparations for the programme begin at nine the previous ...”

“... insisted on the cession of Silesia). Maria Theresa could, however, count on unwavering loyalty at home. In particular, she won the military and moral support of the Palatines. And while the story that she addressed the Diet of Pressburg (now Bratislava) with her baby son in her arms is a fabrication, it captures something important. Family and state were ...”

“... the wicked word was never actually uttered. Matilda ate jam, Matilda ate jelly, Matilda went home With a pain in her – But don’t be mistaken, Don’t be misled, Matilda went home With a pain In her head. How little Rousseau understood child nature when he suggested that children’s acute interest in their body ...”

“... streets are unusually empty. Many Iraqis have decided that the best way to survive is to stay at home or, if they have the money, to leave the country. A sick friend spent hours ringing up surgeries only to be told in each case that the doctor had gone to Jordan, Syria or Iran. Those who stay in Baghdad often don’t go to work until 10 a.m. because suicide ...”

“... from golf – he has netted $19,000 in three years – but what is the alternative? ‘Living at home full-time, football on the tube, a pull-start lawnmower, a kid or two underfoot.’ He had never expected to find himself in a slump; it was true that he hadn’t gone all-out with his studies, but it hardly mattered when golf could help him cut corners on ...”

“... to it in 1919 after ‘a good war’. Comfortable in the company of politicians and officials at home and abroad, and fluent in at least French and German, he became one of that cosmopolitan set of well-dressed journalists, socialites, lobbyists and secret agents forever circulating in the antechambers and corridors of power and in the clubs, country houses ...”

“... fits of anger. The Swedish industrialist Birger Dahlerus witnessed one of these when a letter from Lord Halifax was delivered to the Chancellery during the Polish crisis in August 1939. Hitler launched into a lengthy diatribe. He marched up and down throwing out facts and figures about German military might, then began to shout as if addressing a ...”