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“... there would be an American on the moon before the end of the decade. Was that even possible? As​ Roger Launius, a former official historian of Nasa, explains in Reaching for the Moon, Kennedy was initially unwilling to commit to the expense of space exploration; he changed his mind after Yuri Gagarin’s orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961 and the Bay of Pigs ...”

“... piece of parchment drawn up when Catherine the Great was Empress of All the Russias and George III King of England. The Founding Fathers, wise in their generation, could not foresee Hot Lines, B52s and the social security system, but they knew that they had created an office that might be dangerous to liberty. Hence they hedged it round as best they could with ...”

“... encounters. An English journalist protests his eagerness to spill Duke’s revelations of the King onto the page. The two men haggle and conspire, and Duke blackmails his old friend. This cameo of the turncoat arises out of Bleasdale’s desire to ‘redress the balance’ in Elvis affairs after Goldman and ‘that book’, although much of his villain ...”

“... chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In Al-Fil, an Abyssinian king rides an army of elephants through the desert to conquer Mecca but is defeated when God sends vast flights of swallows to rain pebbles on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper ...”

“... the exams that I was leaving school. When I thought about it, sitting on the playing field at King Alfred’s, the day school that had agreed to take me for the past three years, I’d never heard of anyone going to university after school who didn’t have anywhere to go in the holidays. Where would I live? It seemed an improbable thing and I certainly ...”

“... volume is his relationship – political rather than personal – with the sinister Leopold II, King of the Belgians, who used him as an instrument of his ambition to acquire a colony in Africa. Stanley was unlucky in his choice of patron (or unlucky to have been chosen by him), for his Herculean labours in founding the Congo Free State were to be ...”

“... on the great altar of Notre Dame, hoping that news of its existence would thus reach the King and make it more difficult for his enemies to suppress it. But when he entered Notre Dame he found that his way to the altar was barred by a grill he had never seen before. He felt that Heaven itself was collaborating with the iniquitous work of men and he ...”

“... and beautiful, quite unlike any previous art. Other St Martin’s sculptors included Phillip King, Tim Scott and William Tucker, all innovative artists who became tutors at St Martin’s immediately after completing their own studies. Thenceforward there was a line of sculptors at St Martins who changed, even further, the concept of what sculpture might ...”

“... came with the advent of the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher in May 1979.’ Roger Scruton, by contrast, is writing in a different register in Enoch at 100 when he laments the loss of ‘philosophical acumen’ that led to the anti-socialist truths of the free market being reiterated ‘far less beautifully and with an alienating ...”

“... as a detective. He had cleared Mata Hari of espionage, and he attempted to smear the Irish patriot Roger Casement as a homosexual. But his Milliner’s Hat Mystery provided the inspiration for what might be one of the most effective acts of deception in World War Two. ‘The novel opens on a stormy night with the discovery of a dead man in a barn, carrying ...”

“... a real lady. She did not, though Forman said she would, but thanks to Rowse and to his informant Roger Prior, she has become sufficiently famous after her death to make up for her failure to become a lady in life. Rowse found another Shakespearian connection who had consulted Forman: the wife of a French wig-maker in Silver Street in London, Mrs ...”

“... you are gentleman,’ Morgan said.   No one moved.   Morgan went over to Edward King, head of the Union Trust, and drew him to the table.   ‘There’s the place, King,’ he said, ‘and here’s the pen.’ King signed. The other presidents followed suit ... The ...”

“... robbery and rape of a woman of 88; gang warfare, vandalism, uriniferous subways, bent policemen. Roger Scruton devoted a Times column to a crude misreading of a poem by Reading about Lebanon, a controversy to which Ukulele Music alludes. Reading’s charlady supplies a suitable retort to Scruton – ‘When we want you to chirp up matey, we’ll rattle the ...”

“... a bridge or shutting down a stretch of Oxford Street, as they did in 2019. Both Gail Bradbrook and Roger Hallam, two of the movement’s founding activists, have been exemplary arrestables. Arrests, they argue, are the necessary price for refusing a police order to move, and if enough people are detained, police stations and magistrates’ courts, perhaps even ...”

“... brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge dog, Gozo, so fierce that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its socket and eaten it); Robert Crabbe had lost several toes, which I did not think too serious until he ...”