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“... God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ Visiting Northern Ireland as home secretary in 1970, Reginald Maudling, whose mellow moderation verged on a slothful desire for an easy life, was understandably exasperated by the Ulster problem – but no more so than a long line of politicians, before and since. Churchill – not so easily ...”

“... were intimidated by his habit of stabbing the wooden leg with his paper knife in order to drive home the point of the argument. His journal, a battered naval logbook, contains entries such as ‘To Clarkson’s today to buy a new disguise.’ One of his agents recalled that to approach Cumming’s office, ‘it was necessary for a visitor to climb a ...”

“... of November 1950 who, believing his own press clippings, had foolishly promised to have the troops home from Korea by Christmas. As Nato’s supreme commander, Wesley Clark faced an altogether different adversary: Slobodan Milosevic, the president of what remained of Yugoslavia. Although by 1999 Clark’s nemesis posed no real threat to his neighbours, he ...”

“... history. In Ali’s district, for example, I found that power had recently shifted from a feudal lord to a new commander backed by Iranian cash and weapons, who administered justice and controlled relations with the provincial Government. A new Hazara nationalism was coalescing around Governor Khalili. Women are more visible in Ali’s community than among ...”

“... votaries.’ The British (and the French), who had gone with the same extravagant hope, had come home empty-handed. These differences inevitably determined the kinds of settlement that evolved in the New World. The North American colonies were populated, for the most part, by small farmers who finally displaced (or massacred) rather than integrated the ...”

“... that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of the few where Lockheed has recently shed jobs rather than piled them on. (What Arizona has instead of multiple Lockheed facilities is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, aka the ...”

“... dotted with monuments to Channel voyages of the past. Marooned in the middle of the tarmac is the Lord Warden Hotel, once a luxury palazzo where wealthy 19th-century passengers arriving on the Pullman used to stay on their way to France; it was requisitioned by the navy during the Second World War and has housed a set of offices for freight forwarding agents ...”

“... example of product placement. She started to write fiction in Mecklenburgh Square and made it the home of her heroine in Gaudy Night. On the first page, Harriet Vane looks out at the square’s tulips and tennis players, while thinking of Oxford. She does so, Wade points out, from a room which her suitor, Peter Wimsey, never enters: this is the domain of an ...”

“... a young peasant couple are due to be married, the wedding is cancelled because a local Spanish lord has decided he wants the woman for himself. The years from 1628 to 1630 offered a dramatic backdrop: famine, military invasion and a devastating outbreak of the plague. ‘The material is rich,’ Manzoni wrote to the French historian Claude ...”

“... house where in due time and after prolonged chanting on his part, a great star appeared and the Lord Maitreya came to him in splendour. And then Rosalid’s face shone with divine ecstasy (I quote Nitya) and she cried out repeatedly: ‘Do you see Him? Do you see Him? According to Nitya, Rosalind was the only one who actually did. Nitya’s beautiful story ...”

“... boarding-school, the boy had virtually no education; his mother preferred to keep him at home to go window-shopping with her, or to the cinema. These were the days of the double-feature, and he saw, he estimates, two hundred films a year. He had a crowd of relatives who are, in his view, spiteful, greedy, stupid and pathetic. They manifested ‘a ...”

“... town, or at smart country-house weekends, while the nervously delicate Molly sat resentfully at home. She had a hearing ailment, too, which got worse: ‘the deaf wife of someone who thrived on conversation and theatre-going’. Clever Hearts is an intelligent and sympathetic account of the marriage, co-written by the MacCarthys’ grandson and his ...”

“... Indeed, ‘the pencil in our hand can be the automobile in our garage, the television in our home, the clothes, on our back.’ These are bold claims, given that technology is concerned with power as well as with design and function, and given that pencils, unlike steam engines or word-processors, depend mainly on human power for their use. Petroski, a ...”

“... to Labour – he had no interest in private luxury. Upper-class socialists like Hugh Dalton and Lord Longford occasionally alarmed him by raising the spectre of republicanism, but he found Attlee – once he had got used to him – greatly reassuring. In truth, no such nonsense ever stood a chance. King George and Queen Elizabeth were – deservedly – too ...”

“... the refugees (bearing in mind that Dayton does not specify the right of Croatian Serbs to return home)? The Dayton Agreement is probably the only way out of the current mess. But the very novelty of this peace deal means Europe must remain extremely cautious about the possibility of it succeeding. How did our continent allow itself to sink into such a mire ...”