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“... was that I was in Moscow, reading an edition of a paper published in London, more than 1500 miles away, a four-hour plane journey. Not actually published, in fact, since it hadn’t been printed yet. The first edition of that day’s Sunday Times, already on its way to newsagents and homes in Scotland and the North and West of England, was out of date ...”

“... my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters, When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. Jarrell was drafted late in 1942. ‘Being in the army,’ he wrote, ‘is like being involved in the ...”

“... which, fifty years or more after it was written, burns on the page. Pathological and homosexual. Jonathan Arac, who edited Matthiessen’s letters, wrote that ‘to create the centrally authoritative critical identity of American Renaissance, much had to be displaced, or scattered, or disavowed.’ Matthiessen was aware of this. In January 1930 he wrote to ...”

“... for this level of qualifications.’ He gets up at 6 a.m. most days and walks the two and a half miles to work listening to music: ‘The music is to stop me thinking about the fact that I’m heading here.’ (His MP3 player is broken, so he has been borrowing his wife’s; he can’t skip quickly enough when it gets to ‘Bailamos’ by Enrique ...”

“... order, a Principal Agreement was signed in March 1931 formally granting the IPC 32,000 square miles of Iraqi territory. A hastily convened Iraqi parliament rubber-stamped a deal endorsing the IPC demand that no taxes be levied, in return for a trifling one-time payment by the consortium. Here was the concessionary economy at work. A ramshackle ...”

“... 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”

“... the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key ...”

“... a sub-class of literature of which The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World by Jonathan Powell and The World as It Is by Ben Rhodes are other recent samples: what might be called spin-doctorates of the equerry. Van Rompuy was never a ruler in the sense Blair and Obama were, and van Middelaar never enjoyed the power of Powell and Rhodes. He ...”