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“... with the kind of fervid enthusiasm for Che that I secretly hoped he might have an iota of for me’. He was very serious, but could be very funny too. He taught at MIT for a year but decided he was a poor teacher, inclined to drift. So he applied to a programme at the school newly opened in Los Angeles by the American Film Institute to improve the minds ...”

“... federal boundary, or even marking trees to signal future claims. Twenty years later, John Quincy Adams did not hesitate to send troops to burn down squatters’ homes and crops in Alabama. But these legal enforcements would be swept away in the coming demographic storm. The settler-sceptical northeastern Federalists had many political victories, and the ...”

“... giving on to that square were broad and high. Most of us were crouching on the floor. Not so my mother: she stood up to look. The sailors, she said firmly, were right to mutiny – it was time, the Kaiser’s regime was rotten. My mother had spontaneous physical courage (not inherited by ...”

“... The American poet Alice Goodman wrote two libretti for the American minimalist composer John Adams: Nixon in China, with a text mostly in rhyming couplets, and The Death of Klinghoffer. She has also finished fresh dialogue for a Glyndebourne production of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). ...”

“... a tabula rasa, it is not possible to think that way of the printed page, unless, that is, you are Mr Conrad. The persons he describes are caricatures, often scurrilously drawn, of figures who can be otherwise known or accounted for. Where facts or what was actually written stand in his way, he blithely ignores, changes or distorts. An early example occurs ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... got serious Tony Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in ...”

“... for going into the ring in the world of lies and violence with the likes of Dick Cheney, Gerry Adams, Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac or Robert Mugabe, none of whom has anything to learn from anyone about the uses of power. Advisers are always at hand. But Blair has chosen on the whole to be surrounded by trusted acolytes ...”

“... included Spartacus, depicted as a virtuous rebel against some very British-looking patricians in Robert Montgomery Bird’s melodrama The Gladiator (1831), and the anti-aristocratic hero of Robert Conrad’s Jack Cade (1835), a martyr who dies with the words: ‘The bondman is avenged, ...”

“... allegedly told him that ‘the white bubbies and the silk stockings’ of actresses ‘excite my genitals’. It was only during the 19th century that the word sensible became permanently yoked to the practical, commonsensical part of human nature. Tetty, born in the 17th century, probably did not mean she thought Johnson ...”

“... Two bishops side by side put pressure at long range on the pawns defending the castled Black king. My queen, ready to advance to the middle of the board, completes the threat. Black will have to weaken his defence by advancing a pawn. There are further forces I can bring into play. I find it slightly frustrating that my mechanical opponent either knows what I mean to do or has taken standard precautions: there’s a knight in the way, and I can’t get at it ...”

“... relationship might move on (an ‘Oooh, Ron’, followed by an ‘Oooh, Eth’), Ron’s dad, Mr Glum, would burst through the door with his brusque ‘Ullo, ullo, ullo’ to wreck any chance of intimacy. The scripts were by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, very funny in their day and funny enough now. Ken Livingstone’s mother was an Eth: Ethel Ada ...”

“... suffering and recompense was vast.I need to declare an interest here: a coming to terms with my own past. As a child of the German Jewish diaspora I lived in some intimacy with the Wiedergutmachung, the German reparations. There was a lot of talk in my family and among our friends about finding documents that would ...”

“... it was the year of the first double-decker bus, horse-drawn, of course, produced by Adams and Co. of Bow, London; it was also the year a Patent Mile Index was fitted to a London cab: the first taxi-meter. The Magnetic Telegraph Company, founded by Samuel Morse, was already two years old. Edison wasn’t the only American legend born in 1847; so ...”

“... his girlfriend Aubade lie around, immobilised, thinking about the Laws of Thermodynamics, Henry Adams, heat death, and the imminent decline of all energy. It is a mostly charming, sometimes tiresome showoff piece, but the way it is laid out offers, as does the apartment itself, a neat diagram of how in the novels Pynchon apportions things on a more massive ...”