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“... I read Summers that the FBI had an ‘alternative’ black leader they wished to emplace by these means. It was Samuel Pierce, later to be Ronald Reagan’s ultra-corrupt Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, greeted by the sinister cretin Reagan on one occasion with the salute (to the only black member of his own Cabinet): ‘And how are things in ...”

“... or more of African-Americans have experienced some form of discrimination in housing: that means that, in the current generation, there have been about ten million incidents at least as humiliating to those involved as an incident which Williams recounts from her own experience. The story is no substitute for the statistics, but it makes them a little ...”

“... and Marcello is teaching Anna how to be bored ‘in a certain way. Like brilliantly.’ That means taking his red pencil to phrases such as ‘penetratingly difficult’, but letting ‘eerily symbolic’ survive. (Barthelme’s biographer, Tracy Daugherty, points out that in the same issue as ‘L’Lapse’, a reviewer can be found complaining that ...”

“... which sets an outer limit on the right to life. Lethal aggressors who cannot be stopped by lesser means are liable to lethal attack, and this does not violate their right to life so long as they remain a threat. Killing in self-defence is distinct from execution, the killing of someone who is no longer a threat as a punishment for past conduct. It is also ...”

“... law generally prevails over democratic discontent in spite of adverse electoral consequences. David Cameron must have looked on in envy: he’d tried to talk tough on immigration without any authority to reduce Britain’s openness to southern Europeans. Merkel meanwhile profited from continuing to talk up German openness while having ensured that Germany ...”

“... is a sure sign of a ranch house and irrigation, though there are entire valleys – and a valley means a place five or ten miles wide and several times as long – in which there is no house to be seen. Highway 50 traverses a dozen of these valleys and passes; driven in a day they succeed one another like musical variations, with their subtle differences of ...”

“... be accepted at the outset. Anyone – to be more specific, mountebanks like Daniel Goldhagen and David Cesarani – with not a lot to say, but with a will to dilate about atrocity, can extort a hearing for themselves. Others, with more to say, seem to have a clause in their contracts demanding that they mention it at least once in any article, be it on ...”

“... of deadly pounces – is frequently deployed in an unsisterly manner. Take The Girls of Slender Means (1963): Dorothy’s hips were 36 and a half inches; her bust measurement was only 31, a fact which did not dismay her, as she intended to marry one of three young men out of her extensive acquaintance who happened to find themselves drawn to boyish ...”

“... conversation with a senior cabinet member who has decided not to contest the election, which means he will have to stand down come the reshuffle in a few weeks. ‘I’m in a job I love,’ he says, ‘but I can’t go on.’ He added: ‘Forcing Tony Blair out was the stupidest thing we ever did.’  Whole place sunk in gloom. Pleasure at the latest ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... for GP training to more than eight for neurosurgery. Some programmes are ‘run-through’, which means you start straight away, but most require two more years of core training (another four or six placements) before you apply for jobs as a registrar. You can be well into your thirties before becoming a consultant, even later if research breaks and parental ...”

“... message to CIA agents that ‘the most important thing is to avoid false positives … even if it means a few true positives slip through.’ He made the same argument a few years earlier to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: ‘With regard to counterterrorism operations in general, and the el-Masri matter in particular … the scale tips decisively ...”

“... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...”

“... an exhibition structure conceived as ‘a huge shelving system’ (a project presented by means of a Meccano model), and an apartment high-rise in which almost everything could emerge from a kit of prefabricated parts. Given projects such as the Reliance Controls factory and the ‘zip-up house’, the Beaubourg did not come out of the ...”

“... decipherer’s childhood: one of the most brilliant of the American decipherers of Mayan glyphs, David Stuart, was already drawing them at the age of eight, when he went on a trip to the Yucatán with his parents. Childhood is, or anyway was in my cryptophile generation, a time for slipping conspiratorially in and out of the linguistic disguise of some code ...”