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“... a habit of playing politics when he shouldn’t was the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. Throughout the financial crisis, Brown believed that King went beyond his remit in permitting his political views – particularly what Brown calls ‘his personal attitude to debt’ – to interfere with his policy ...”

“... for his stylistic grace. The Stamp Act Crisis, written more than thirty years ago with his wife Helen, has become a classic, and anyone curious about the coming of the American Revolution would be well-advised to start with this masterful account. It is not surprising that Inventing the People has already won several prestigious awards given to historians ...”

“... separated, at birth, who goes on to discover that he is his own non-existent, royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge supported by the likelihood that ...”

“... 20. If he loved Nietzsche when he subsequently discovered him (and he did love Nietzsche, much as King Kong loved Fay Wray – brandishing him threateningly before the American public, squeezing all the sense out of him, so that it would take years before Nietzsche could be read as written), it was because he found there what he was determined to find, the ...”

“... used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many readers accepted would do for the time being. In what my headmaster used to call the interim period, self-help books have taken over the world, which is fast becoming a place where no one is safe from the threat of their own ...”

“... Evans’s images, and In the Street, a spare, poetic documentary about Spanish Harlem, filmed by Helen Levitt.) Life magazine ran a seven-page spread on the movie’s ‘earthy verisimilitude’. Audiences accustomed to Hollywood coyness were amazed to see Anna Magnani’s skirt ride up, revealing her garter straps, when she is shot by a German soldier in ...”

“... work of art as a miniature token of a larger story about tyranny: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. A sonnet without a sequence is a part without a whole, and that is one ...”

“... War, North Korea could lay claim to the material achievements listed by the former CIA analyst Helen-Louise Hunter: compassionate care for children in general and war orphans in particular; ‘radical change’ in the position of women; free housing; free healthcare and preventive medicine; and infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the ...”

“... Congressional hearings to have a national audience. He defeated the liberal one-time film star Helen Gahagan Douglas in a mudslinging race to be California senator and, not yet 40, was nominated to run in 1952 as Eisenhower’s vice-president. Accused of dipping into a campaign slush fund, Nixon saved his candidacy with a televised address known as the ...”

“... recently tackled, with amused brio, the life and times of the last of the materialising mediums, Helen Duncan, who was imprisoned for her activities and died only in 1956.2 In this lucid and richly layered study, Luckhurst echoes Terry Castle’s ‘the invention of the uncanny’ (from The Female Thermometer), to tell the story of telepathy. Castle ...”

“... Haganah paramilitary forces (which would become the core of the Israeli army) and secretly meeting King Abdullah of Transjordan on the eve of the 1948 war to urge restraint. On 14 May 1948, hours before the mandate expired, she was one of the 37 signatories to Israel’s Declaration of Independence. The following year, she ran for election to the Knesset as a ...”

“... in his pocket, unable to speak French and not knowing anybody there, and before long was the king of dressmakers. Each season he held court, showing several designs in his atelier (on live models!) to select clients, who would choose their outfits and be measured up inhouse. Empress Eugénie, his foremost patron, was still waited on at the Elysée (until ...”

“... and greed is more disquietingly shown in an adventure story like ‘The Man who would be King’ than it is in Conrad’s anti-Imperialist fables, because Kipling is on the side of Empire, not safely against it. But at the end of ‘The Man who would be King’ an emblem of Empire, the crown of gold and turquoise ...”

“... in which he protests her superiority to mythical heroines of every stripe, from Andromeda to Helen. However crazy her behaviour, she proceeded always with absolute confidence, brooking neither argument nor delay. Though she caused havoc almost wherever she went, for Graves these conflicts were evidence of her ineffable, otherworldly ...”

“... at Baalbek. The surrounding buildings are higher than they were when the church was built, but King George shows clear above the roof line, just as he does in Hogarth’s Gin Lane. All in all, the design of the church is majestic – original, strange and energetic. But from the office window we could see that weeds had found a foothold in the ...”