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“... best. Johnson was soon the star attraction of a circle that included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney and Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of the group adorned the walls of the library in Streatham. Hester presided with remarkable wit, vivacity and in Burney’s neologism, ‘agreeability’; in both contemporary and modern ...”

“... granted. Before long, having explored some of the smaller towns to the west of Kimberley, he is ready to move on, ‘not because of the other ghosts I encountered wherever I turned; it was my own ghostliness I had begun to find so burdensome.’ He is dismayed, too, by the absence of spoken English. ‘The people I knew had vanished; so had their ...”

“... by his earnest and readily astonished transatlantic correspondent, Taylor showed himself always ready to oblige, explaining that he had gone on television to debate war origins with Hugh Trevor-Roper ‘solely because I was paid to do so’. What with these shock-horror revelations, can we wonder that Cole’s incendiary manuscript was tucked away in a ...”

“... to find larger readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing ...”

“... in the same state as Sarah was in at the end of their affair, poised on the brink of faith, almost ready to change the way he sees the world in order to accommodate his distress and the unbearable weight of excess coincidence. The best bit of symbolism in the film is a kind of intertextual joke. Fiennes’s performance is inescapably reminiscent of his role in ...”

“... would have been the first to appreciate the risk involved. But he was, as time went on, no less ready to recognise the possible threat to his own position. Crown princes have deposed monarchs. Churchill was formidable, wary and popular. He would only go when he could no longer stay. Mr Carlton points out, however, that in 1939 it was by no means certain ...”

“... counted for little without favourable facts of political life. The essential fact was that Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army was pledged both to unqualified victory and to liberty of conscience, and that the parliamentarian peace party, which had allied itself with the Presbyterians – Milton’s ‘old priest writ large’ – was bent on the ...”

“... Kea – headed a team of white nurses. It was also the first place where a black officer – Oliver Law – commanded an integrated American brigade in battle. Hochschild returns again and again to American non-intervention – the policy Roosevelt himself afterwards called ‘a grave mistake’. Roosevelt had instinctive sympathy for the Republican ...”

“... A day when, had either of us been well enough, we would have gone on the march which, thanks to Oliver Letwin’s amendment, turned out marginally more hopeful than I was expecting. Looking for a book to read in bed, I take down as I think Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme. It seems less chatty than I remember and it’s only when I come to the end of ...”

“... plan to his advantage, in the knowledge that there are quite a lot of people in the world who are ready to persuade themselves of almost anything rather than admit that a man with an air of over-the-top fraudulence has been taking them for a ride.Blay-Miezah was born in 1941, when Ghana was still the Gold Coast. John Kolorah Blay grew up in a tiny village ...”

“... bill of £193 million arriving in 2022. As with the financial crisis, nobody senior went to jail. Oliver Schmidt, an engineering executive, made the mistake of going on holiday to the US, where he was arrested, charged, tried, pled guilty and was sent to prison for seven years. (Schmidt’s sentence was supposed to run until Christmas this year, but he was ...”

“... and existed mainly in the shape of its External Mission – the exile group in London led by Oliver Tambo. Buthelezi had been an ANC supporter in his youth and was, at least at first, keen to stay on side with the ANC, securing their blessing, for example, before he accepted the position of chief minister of the KwaZulu Bantustan. It seems likely that ...”

“... engineers. A worthy cause attracts causeless entrepreneurs. Instant experts pontificate about ready options for a creeping revolution. Some claim to seek ‘moral clarity’ that derives from the ‘scale of the land and its antagonisms’. Many more, one suspects, secretly enjoy what Gordimer calls ‘the last colonial extravaganza’.It is difficult for ...”

“... on the far side of the fence. Sometimes they get drunk and invade his property. But he’s ready for them. There’s a feathered shamanic wand in the bedroom. There have been rumours of sweat-lodge ceremonies, the casting out of a personal demon – thought of as the unappeased spirit of the dead Joan Vollmer Burroughs, shot through the forehead in ...”

“... blonde hairdos of the presenters might accurately be described as both fair and balanced. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, ‘I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.’ But the reverse is also true: quotations are ...”