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“... after World War One’ – and went on to describe the guilt and distress felt by Septimus Warren Smith on his return home from the war. Mr Amini said: ‘What happens to him?’ ‘He jumps out of a window.’ ‘Islam doesn’t countenance suicide,’ he said with satisfaction. I said: ‘Did you take part in Karbala Four?’ ‘Why do you ask questions ...”

“... men who cannot innovate and would have rejected the Beatles, the personal computer and Christopher Columbus’s first voyage as utter lunacy. But they don’t give up. They struggle, they sweat blood, they network in coffee bars until – at last! – they get the power and the page lead in the Financial Times; the glory and the marketing ...”

“... Green told his interviewer that ‘the writer must be disengaged’, and enjoyed pointing out that Christopher Isherwood, who called Living ‘the best proletarian novel ever written’, had never worked in a factory himself. Pontifex’s own employees, having rumbled the fact that Yorke and Green were the same, weren’t so impressed. ‘I read your ...”

“... warlord masquerading as a merchant. In Britain, the Company was attacked by Burke and Adam Smith for combining opportunism and monopolistic greed. The Company eventually responded by building up what it saw as its moral superiority and entitlement to rule India, even if only as the ostensible representative of an absent Mughal emperor. Three ideas were ...”

“... one that he is stuck for ever in the era of the liberation struggle. During the many years of Ian Smith’s white minority regime, it seemed there was little that Mugabe’s party, Zanu, could do in the face of white power. Zanu’s armed wing, Zanla, was no match for the better trained and better equipped Rhodesians, and Mugabe dreamed in vain of driving out ...”

“... means they are a little difficult to follow, unlike the clearly presented definitive edition by Christopher Decker in 1997 (Decker’s edition is out of print). But the changes are worth attending to: here is a poet who not only throws his voice to speak as someone else, but can’t quite settle on the pitch. This is the opening verse in his 1859 ...”

“... the same rhythms as the Christian [and] the whole sea shared a common destiny.’As Julia Clancy-Smith has shown, the central Mediterranean corridor remained a borderland society well into the 19th century, as tens of thousands of Southern Europeans abandoned its islands and northern edges for Muslim-majority lands, turning languishing ports such as ...”

“... The same ‘cash for questions’ controversy also later accounted for two senior ministers, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton, who had to leave their posts at the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Trade respectively. The paradox behind this extraordinary succession of resignations is that none of them has been for what traditional constitutional law ...”

“... her and hers.In an early story called ‘On the Day E.M. Forster Died’, the middle-aged Mrs Smith is released from the great man’s influence. Sitting in the London Library, as is her habit when her three small children are at school, she has the idea for something like the quartet. It is the book that will contain all of it: Suez, the naming of ...”

“... Aristide’s departure was at best facilitated, at worst coerced by the US and France,’ Gayle Smith, a member of the National Security Council staff under Clinton, recently said. Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ...”

“... acknowledge this. ‘The end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely,’ as Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper put it in their two-volume history of Britain’s colonial wars in India and South-East Asia from the 1940s to 1963, which forms the perfect complement to Hyam’s work.* It was clearly not as pretty as that ‘great ship goes ...”

“... he called at his house, he said: ‘Guys, what about launching a paper?’ We decided we would and Christopher Logue was deputed to go to what’s now the British Library to look into possible names. I’d said: ‘I’m totally opposed to traditional left names – “Workers’ this”, or “Socialist that”. The people who are coming into politics are not ...”

“... of these matters. Mr Logan, on the evidence of style as well as content, is an adherent of Christopher Ricks, whose essay ‘In Theory’ (LRB, Vol.3, No 7) claimed Aristotle as an ally. He says that ‘Aristotle is to be believed’ when he observes that ‘it is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the ...”

“... Asia. When James Wolfe marched on New France in 1759 he compared himself, quite deliberately, to Christopher Columbus. Pagden is right of course to point out that many Enlightenment intellectuals were anxious to assert the primacy of commerce over conquest. But they did so in part precisely because they feared that a new phase of worldwide conflict ...”

“... modern art culture – Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Krasner, Hans Hofmann, the sculptor David Smith – which had spent a decade submitting to the master. ‘Aha,’ Gorky is supposed to have said coldly to de Kooning on first being shown the younger artist’s Picasso-saturated work, ‘so you have ideas of your own.’ Picasso’s aren’t good enough ...”