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“... attributing the coinage to Simon Sebag Montefiore (elsewhere it is attributed to Professor James Matisoff, a celebrated coiner of neologisms). But however we wish to describe it, the phenomenon is achieved, if not quite without firing a shot, at least without the deployment of huge armies or indeed of organised nation states. Only briefly under the ...”

“... of my relations worked at the dockyard – Rosyth was a handy provider of employment after the mills and mines of West Fife had begun to close in the 1930s – and as a boy I was infected with Naval enthusiasm. At home I underscored ships’ names in the ABC of British Warships with purloined dockyard pencils stamped with the words War Department and the ...”

“... capital from the Old World to the New, to float government bonds and build railroads, steel mills, farm equipment, electrical plants (initially, in the 1850s, through J.S. Morgan and Co, the London bank he would eventually take over from his father); restructuring the railroads (a process known as Morganisation), which stimulated production and the ...”

“... to pragmatism (whose philosophical elements he had picked up while studying under William James), and then finally to national prominence as a pundit who wrote regularly for the New Republic, the New York World, the Herald Tribune, the Washington Post and Newsweek. The keynote of his manner throughout his career was dispassionate impartiality, which ...”

“... can’t afford to devote yourself full-time to your academic job. One professor owns two maize mills and runs a taxi service. One lecturer has a bar, another deals in second-hand Peugeots and is owed millions of shillings by the Government for the hire of one of his cars. Assistant lecturers struggle along by working part-time in several schools at ...”

“... in 1815) brought the poor to the brink of starvation. The stark new multistorey cotton mills of Manchester and Salford employed more and more men, women and children. Textiles, however, were still mostly produced in the traditional way by handloom weavers, working at home or in small workshops in the towns and villages surrounding Manchester, which ...”

“... that they had been living in ‘unsupportable Captivity’, working at the furnaces and sugar mills, and ‘digging in this scorching Island’ with only roots and water to sustain them. They had been ‘bought and sold still from one Planter to another, or attached as horses or beasts for the debts of their masters’. Many had been badly beaten. Having ...”

“... of such passages: the limp rhythms, the feeble concessives, the insecure pronouns, the dreary Mills & Boonish cadence with its terminal cliché. And for that matter less severe reviewers might be so roused, having committed themselves to reading more than five hundred pages of this kind of prose. Perhaps the book (unlike most of Orwell’s) was written ...”

“... interest to grow – lost some of its power to throw up new combinations and inventions. But the mills were rolling, and the large abstract canvases which became the badge of New York painting went on being produced in moulds which had to a large extent already been formed. De Kooning, says Tom Armstrong, director of the Whitney Museum of American ...”

“... one reason he slotted so well into its pages. His heroes were the great humourists of the 1940s, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ...”

“... and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a young, growing and prosperous country, where men’s problems have been simpler than in Europe and usually soluble by energy ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”

“... as evidenced by Fred McDarrah’s 1962 Village Voice photograph of Sontag in the atrium of the Mills Hotel, cigarette cocked like a cafe intellectual with scorn to burn. Among postwar writers, Sontag was not alone in possessing glossy sex appeal. The young Gore Vidal boasted matinee-idol looks, Truman Capote beheld the camera like a debauched cherub on the ...”

“... grandfather crossed over and back more than once in those days, to Pittsburgh and its steel mills, in search of work.’ Pat ‘was to die in these mills, crushed to death in the railway yard of Carnegie’s steelworks’. His mother was born Catherine Bowe in County Wexford in 1910, near where the rivers Barrow and ...”

“... thought they were seeing the new China rising. But what they were really witnessing, between steel mills and river dams, were the remaining sights and cultural landscapes and habits of an old China about to be swept away for ever. Were these visitors just useful idiots, in their excitement at seeing a great people about to emerge from millennia of poverty, and ...”