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“... after independence, its absorption of princely states a ‘stupendous achievement’, its foreign policy ‘a staggering performance’. Nehru himself, ‘in the hearts and minds of his countrymen’, is ‘George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rolled into one’.All countries have fond images of themselves, and big ...”

“... Game” ’. All these years later, Steele has still failed to winkle any more details out of the Foreign Office – but then again, those other celebrity spies, Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene, were equally close-lipped about what they actually did in the war. Shipton’s job, whatever it was, ended in October 1942. He walked out again, and in ...”

“... countryside, seaside holidays and an unparalleled tradition of Parliamentary government. To entice foreign visitors, four London buses made a promotional tour of the Continent. The lead bus, which sported a giant Union Jack, broadcast a continuous recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks ...”

“... neo-Soviet populists who propagate the false notion of the USSR as a paradisiac Russian-speaking commonwealth, benignly ruled from Moscow, a natural continuum of the tsarist empire, disturbed only by Nazi invaders to whom ‘the west’ are heirs and the only obstacle to its re-creation. If you were born after 1985 you have no remembered reality to measure ...”

“... had been ‘highly committed adult participants in the epic, glorious rebirth of the Jewish commonwealth’. It was Simha Flapan, Morris wrote, who began to see the central fallacies of the old history: first, that the Jewish settler community in Palestine, the Yishuv, joyously embraced partition and the truncated Jewish state prescribed by the UN ...”

“... EU’s share of British trade has recently been shrinking, in 2015, the latest year for which the Office for National Statistics has published figures, 44 per cent of UK exports went to EU countries. So why, in Hannan’s mind, would the cost of meeting EU standards be a better reason to leave the single market than the single market’s commitment to free ...”

“... more intention than Lawson or Howe of hewing to her vision of Europe. With scarcely over a year in office behind him, Major signed the Treaty of Maastricht, after negotiating an opt-out from the single currency. On his return to London, the government press release crowed that the upshot of the conference in the Netherlands was ‘game, set and match’ to ...”

“... Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund. More than anyone, you’d think, it would matter to the people who made these arrangements possible in the first place. What has happened is not what they promised or intended when they put ...”

“... or an insurrectionary group, or a religious movement, to be seen presenting themselves at a foreign embassy day after day in the hope of obtaining a visa. Even if the embassy is not under surveillance, there are likely to be local staff who will report the application. Safer, for those who can afford airline tickets, to think of a destination that does ...”

“... family tree concocted for Philip’s father, they acquired substance only as members of the new office-holding and courtly nobility that grew up under Henry VIII and Edward VI. The standard of living to which they then grew accustomed became a heavy burden under Elizabeth, whose favours to the family were intermittent and grudging. From the late 16th ...”

“... British Constitution in the Streets of the World’s Metropolis, London, Londres, London?’ The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether understand . . . ‘It merely referred,’ Mr Podsnap explained, with a sense of meritorious proprietorship, ‘to Our Constitution, Sir. We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution, Sir. It ...”

“... and secret documents. He pioneered a system of spy networks which long outlasted the English Commonwealth. The documents and reports brought back by couriers from the Continent (still available in the British Library) were analysed in detail by a group that included John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Among other things, they helped support the operations of ...”

“... and chagrin, hailed Marx as a neglected seer of capitalist crisis. The trendspotting Foreign Policy led the way, with a cover story on Marx for its Next Big Thing issue, enticing readers with a promise of star treatment: ‘Lights. Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now.’ Though written by a socialist, Leo Panitch, the piece was typical of the ...”

“... rhetoric of absolutism and submission ‘places the right and might of sovereignty in the office of the monarch’, as Manuel Schonhorn puts it in Defoe’s Politics (1991), his rather lopsided, overly monarchist study, critics tend to link the novel only intermittently to the historical period it covers, and have not succeeded in offering a critical ...”

“... started muttering discontentedly. By the time the camera showed Omar’s uncle in his garage office humping away with his half-undressed, red-corseted mistress I was having doubts. ‘Bakwas!’ shouted my father. (Bollocks!) His milk was untouched. When we got to the scene in which Omar’s cousin, Tania, is so bored at a family get-together that she ...”