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“... Another senior al-Qaida figure, Abu al Walid al-Masri, put it even more bluntly. Bin Laden, he said, had led his followers to ‘the abyss’. A decade later those concerns seemed to have been vindicated. By 2011 al-Qaida had been reduced to a few bands of men hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Distracted by the need to evade ...”

“... as it has been technically possible for it to access is widely accepted. In response to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the NSA put out a statement in August to expand on the public description of its mission, defining signals intelligence (or SIGINT) – its primary job – as ‘the production of foreign intelligence through the collection, processing ...”

“... change can ever be fully explained. ‘We prove, we do not explain our birth,’ Marianne Moore said. There is always an element of the random in the historical which demands respect. If Shakespeare himself was a romancing artist, old-fashioned beside sophisticated and newly classicising contemporaries, it was perhaps because freer methods allowed him to ...”

“... relationship. Unreasonably, Bandini has just been abusing her shoes: ‘I hate you,’ she said. I felt her hatred. I could smell it, even hear it coming out of her, but I sneered again. ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘Because there must be something pretty fine about a guy who rates your hatred.’ Then she ...”

“... at the same time not antagonising the National Party government to no good purpose: we must, he said, walk a tightrope through civil war, revolution and any other form of mayhem, and be waiting at the end to embrace the winner. ‘Some sort of war might well have broken out in 1899 even if gold had never been discovered in the Transvaal in 1886,’ Hyam and ...”

“... where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like the voice of the devil. Someone better informed put me right. It was Auden, at that time still with blondish hair and the face yet to go under the harrow.I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have ...”

“... detected through the thicket of names. ‘A wonderful, dainty, very loving little novelist’, he said of his friend Christopher Isherwood. As with many of those who are dependent for their status on the high status of others – none more than Spender, who thought ‘continually of those who were truly great’ – there appeared to be a measure of disdain ...”

“... sisters. In the event, baby Dora died only months after her fictional namesake. The last boy was Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, named after the aristocrat and hugely popular novelist, who, needless to say, was a friend of Dickens and published in Household Words. With the one exception of Dora, then (a tribute to his own genius perhaps, since he felt that ...”

“... affair, one of the sleaziest episodes of post-war politics: not because of anything Mr Profumo said or did, but because of what the Labour Party said and did. Labour maintained that it was not concerned with morals – oh no, of course not – but solely with Britain’s security. Because Ivanov, an attaché at the ...”

“... is even more at odds with anything that emerges from Dr Li’s interviews, and it must be said that the latter offer a considerable invitation to the 20 paedophiles to ‘validate’ their activity in a bad sense. Dr Li has adopted a trendy, ‘hermeneutic’ approach to his theme whereby sex sounds very much like the pursuit of a piece of academic ...”

“... the “British” who are to blame.’ As regards Browning, this is the exact obverse of what is said. As regards football, I can’t imagine where Lucas has been living. The English/British distinction has been drawn much too firmly by FIFA in recent years for it to have escaped anyone who follows football. And what does he mean by calling Culloden a ...”

“... entirely of British subjects. Even Weale admits that none of the British subjects involved can be said to have made a significant contribution to the German war effort. Technical problems meant that the average radio listener had difficulty in receiving the German propaganda broadcasts, and although the British Free Corps reached its peak strength early in ...”

“... of their genius, as the non-combatants Picasso or T.S. Eliot were to do. In a very different way Edward Thomas, who found his true voice in the war but independently of the fighting, would probably have kept it, and been a real presence in post-poetry: yet speculation has an element of post hoc propter hoc. More typical is the way in which each country is ...”

“... sold 300,000 copies, under the name of ‘Ginx’s Baby’, the title of a contemporary novel by Edward Jenkins MP, a passionate satire about welfare reform – using ‘reform’ in the obsolete sense of ‘improvement’. Ekman’s personal testament forms the afterword. His journey from Young-Turk Skinnerist to mature Darwinian is instructive. His ...”

“... showcase there is a mahogany cigar-box bearing the simple inscription “The Fort”. This was Edward III’s personal humidor.’ And the visit ends: ‘I said good-bye to the shop but it didn’t answer back. Shops never do. Old man Proudhon was right: property is deaf.’ Cigar-smoking is also described as quite a ...”