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“... demonstrates a firmness of intention which makes the title slightly fraudulent. In the Wild West idiom, ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta to do’: but when and where a man has ‘gotta’ write an autobiography is a matter for debate. The interesting question is why Mr Mortimer chose this moment of his life to write this book. One senses a ...”

“... Monica; the Venice Lido; the beach at Barcelona; the abandoned pool at Williams’s house on Key West. Williams was buried at sea, as he’d wanted, his body dropped into the Gulf of Mexico where Hart Crane fell overboard and drowned. ‘I’ve always admired the gentleman,’ Williams said, ‘and I never had the opportunity to meet him.’ The pool at the ...”

“... Russians persist in calling, in a quaint phrase, ‘the smell of oil’. And so serious has the West’s concern with this region become that the US President has proclaimed it to be an area which America will defend at the risk of war. Not only are the Russians apparently being warned by the spotlit preparation of the 110,000-strong Rapid Deployment ...”

“... often repetitive of each other and some seem to differ little from political polemics, but with Anthony Kenny, Michael Dummett, Roger Ruston and Bernard Williams among the contributors there is much that is worth considering. All four of these philosophers reject the notion that it is meaningful to have the bomb without having the hypothetical intention to ...”

“... window.’ Suvorov, now a young GRU officer, is told he won’t desert because, however richly the West were to reward him, he would be no different in the West from everyone else; on the other hand, as a member of the Soviet nomenklatura, he can be the envy of everyone in the Communist world. Shevchenko was rather more ...”

“... contrast, was always imagined as a safe place. The Longs were welcomed by their relatives – rich West Indian merchants in London and landed gentry in Suffolk. They settled in Chichester, a genteel southern English town, in an area liked by returning ‘West Indians’ because of its tranquillity and its relative proximity ...”

“... At this stage, one of Toryism’s least secret weapons was the Young Conservative organisation. Anthony Bailey, then a schoolboy in Hampshire, recalls: ‘I did a number of things purely because they provided a way of meeting girls. I joined the local branch of the Young Conservatives for that purpose. Labour continued to govern the nation, but I was less ...”

“... erudition he was certainly his father’s son, but since his father had settled in Agen, in South-West France, before he was born (in 1540), he was subject to different forces – to Calvinism, for instance, which he embraced at the age of 22. It is a mystery how this dutiful son, with his boundless energy, who had always intended completing his father’s ...”

“... Social Democratic Party in 1875, and like others who would not overtly align themselves with him (Anthony Benn once told an audience of Yorkshire miners that English socialists didn’t get their ideas from ‘old German books’), have equally few. The difficulty is that both exist, that neither can be said to be very exact about the possible institutional ...”

“... for the Brexit vote lay with either economic privation or cultural loss. In The Lure of Greatness, Anthony Barnett, the founder of Charter 88 and co-founder of Open Democracy, has identified a third: the constitution. Those who focus on the economic explanation, for Brexit as for the election of Donald Trump, point to the increasing disparity between rich and ...”

“... the judgment to be made about the wisdom of the Emperor’s diplomatic move. Interestingly enough. Anthony Mockler, with his detailed work on Italian sources, is inclined to endorse Evelyn Waugh’s emphatically held opinion that Haile Selassie was very ill-advised to go public over Walwal since it was this that drove the Duce to go over the top. On the other ...”

“... was becoming hysterical, the gang leader was captured: she had been hiding out in a cottage in West Cork. The paintings were found unharmed in the boot of her car.Rose Dugdale wasn’t what anybody was expecting. For one thing, she was an English heiress, the daughter of a member of Lloyd’s of London who owned an estate in Devon. Born in 1941, she had ...”

“... race’. It’s a subtle piece of work, but Satyanarayana’s version of the encounter between the West and the non-West has nearly been lost to us. The fame that eluded Satyanarayana has been granted of late to other authors from India and of Indian origin, mostly writing in English. In their forefront is the author of this ...”

“... found themselves simultaneously engaged in the Gaza Strip, in East Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank and – most troubling of all for Netanyahu – in Israel’s so-called ‘mixed cities’, where well-organised Jewish militias attacked Palestinian citizens, who in turn attacked Jews and set fire to synagogues. The attacks by Jewish mobs inside ...”

“... committed. The victims were vagrant youths whom nobody missed, rent boys, no-hopers, waifs of the West End. They were seldom even reported missing. No wonder they went home with him. When they disappeared, nobody cared, except, perhaps, Dennis Nilsen. I am sitting cross-legged on the carpet, drinking and listening to music ... I drain my glass and take the ...”