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“... David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next ...”

“... can probably tell you more about their unconscious minds than their dreams can. But then again, it may just be that in a past life I helped sell rhinos to the ancient Greeks. Martin Amis, whatever he may have been in a past life, is currently turning into Gyles Brandreth. Blazoned across the Daily Telegraph on 13 June were ...”

“... Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across the docks, and Nissan was mass-producing Primeras and Micras ...”

“... of the arrogance of the strong and the shame of the weak, defeated Germans. The name of Hitler may not get much prominence in the book, the Nazi Party would figure only in the stories – some of them harrowing – of the ignorance of Allied efforts to de-Nazify school-teachers and censor school books, of arbitrary arrests of apparently innocent citizens ...”

“... are interpreted as proof, and Covid becomes the string on which any and all conspiracy theories may be threaded. Seen through the conspiracist filter, by forcing us to wear masks, by closing bars and isolating the frail elderly, by trying to terrify us over, as they see it, a dose of flu, or by microwaving us with 5G, the secret elite has shown its hand.Now ...”

“... up to the Macclesfield Mamba for five minutes. Tom steps into the ring, his jaw set. Young he may be, but he is also lithe and fit, his limbs straight and his heart British ... By clever footwork he evades the lethal clutch of the Mamba for the first four and a half minutes, but at last he is caught when the Mamba pretends to stumble and Tom offers him ...”

“... the stages of nature as they have changed through the successive periods of British prehistory. David Stoddart’s conclave of geographers engage in a philosophical exploration of geography itself. It is always a pleasure to find a tribute to the schoolroom. Richard Muir was fortunate to have an inspiring teacher who contrived to overcome ‘the tedious O ...”

“... safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the mind. No director realises this more clearly than David Cronenberg. He is best known no doubt for The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and his much vilified Crash (1996), but some of us have a soft spot, if that’s the term, for his early work The Brood (1979), a classic instance of the acting-out theory. A ...”

“... with Keira as the once and future whistleblower Katharine Gun, watching Tony Blair explain to David Frost why it was necessary for Britain to go to war. ‘Bloody liar,’ she says. ‘They’re all bloody liars.’ Frost and Bliar don’t react. (I remember this too, the fury and the not-reacting.) Blair leans forward and insists that Saddam has weapons ...”

“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... blue, and a diminutive grey-haired person in a drab overall called Janey, a sort of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after my baby sister and a taller and somewhat younger nanny in a felt hat who took me to Victoria Park to feed the deer. The new house was at 78 ...”

“... surrenders his typewriter keys to another person, an immigrant child who, like himself, may conceivably grow up to be the ‘writer in the family’. Other examples of this convention would be easy to find. Where earlier centuries preferred the modes of tragic or comic finality – ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’ or ‘And they all lived happily ...”

“... David Hockney’s new study, Secret Knowledge, sets out a thesis with vast implications, both for the way we look at Old Master paintings and the way we think about painting’s relation to photography. The more attention you give the thesis, however, the more Hockney’s presentation starts to frustrate you. What you get is, first, a brisk illustrated lecture explaining how he hit on his ideas, a lecture that involves rushing every which way round the National Gallery, pointing out telling visual evidence and adding speculative asides ...”

“... Tina. ‘Wonderful! … Where’s the library?’) At the end of 1997 Brown was replaced by David Remnick, who as an editor is less Buzz-happy than Brown, but as a writer ranges, browlessly, from Kremlin politics to Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile Seabrook lived to tell the tale, though half his chapters are revamped articles written for Brown, whom he regards ...”