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“... who range from newspaper editors to political historians, it may make very little difference. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, changing the top man in important business corporations rarely affects the price of their shares on the market. A rapid glance at the history of the USA also suggests scepticism about the impact of individual leaders. That ...”

“... one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what happened when James Callaghan resigned the leadership late ...”

“... to other people, he made no provision for his wife and children. Every commercial venture he took up was a failure. Like the Joyces, the Mangans flitted from one miserable house to another. The misfortunes the poet suffered included illness of several kinds, debility, and in later years addiction to drink and, it may be, to opium. His employment was ...”

“... other side of the Atlantic (in France and America they occupied great universities: here, students took over colleges of art). The FBI put Ayers and Dohrn at the top of its ‘most wanted’ lists; in Germany, the violent actions, trials and suicides of the RAF leaders dominated and defined the political culture of the mid-1970s. It’s hard to conceive of ...”

“... to discern the state of religious life in the parishes. Local worthies sent reports to the bishop, John Trefnant, who processed through the diocese with a cadre of officials to investigate, judge and correct any troublesome behaviour. The visitation book, ‘an unsightly and tattered manuscript’, was discovered in the archives of Hereford Cathedral in ...”

“... By chance, the evening I took this book to bed for the painful reading expected, I jabbed the tooth of a comb down a fingernail and cried out. As a reminder of what Klaus Barbie was about, not just at the Hotel Terminus in Lyon forty years ago but at the Bolivian Joint Chiefs of Staff headquarters in La Paz as late as 1980, the moment served ...”

“... turn in the tide of battle prevented a worse catastrophe than Hiroshima. In March 1985, Vanunu took his camera into the Dimona plant and systematically photographed it. How he was able to do so remains an important question for Israeli state security, celebrated so often (with the help of its own propaganda machine) as ruthlessly efficient. At any rate, by ...”

“... observes that already many of Hong Kong’s richest capitalists, some of whom fled China after Mao took power in 1949, have made their peace with the Communists. Men like the archetypal Hong Kong billionaire Sir Y.K. Pao have built universities, hospitals and schools in their native provinces, where they are regarded as local heroes, and carry as much ...”

“... This was marked by a barely suppressed tension between himself and many Social Democrats as he took the Party towards the right. But the authority of his leadership and a sustained performance of great skill in Parliament and on television kept the SDP in the public eye. Of the 16 by-elections held between 1983 and 1987, the Alliance won five and was ...”

“... was founded. It infected the clockwork socialism which was so popular in the Thirties. Men like John Strachey could see that capitalism wasn’t working, and so concluded, empirically, that it could never, even for a moment, rise above its contradictions or expand. When there was a period of steady capitalist expansion for thirty years after the ...”

“... of Oklahoma, and of her adversary, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, and of his Senate sponsor, John Danforth, and of his most effective champion on the Senate Judicial Committee, the fearsomely-named and viciously forensic Arlen Spector. On 11 October, when Professor Hill began her televised allegations, this was the only part of the campus to show any ...”

“... whole event in some sane perspective? They cannot retreat into a grand carelessness until they are John le Carré or John Fowles. They might begin, however, by running through the list of previous winners and working out how many of the last 19 would feature in any ‘true’ list of Top 19 Novels 1969-87. They might observe ...”

“... the creator of Sherlock Holmes somehow possessed himself of one of her gloves, and at once took it to a Mr Horace Leaf with a result which he describes in a letter to the Morning Post, written on 16 December (ten days, that is, after Agatha Christie had vanished), and now reprinted in the present volume of selections from Conan Doyle’s letters to the ...”

“... by funding an online lottery to award 113 people 10,000 RMB (£1130) each – 23 million netizens took part. Educated in England (Winchester and UCL), Wang Sicong’s style is in every way different from his father’s, which is quite low-key. Wang Jr enjoys conspicuous consumption, showing off his private jet, his fancy cars, his dozens of girlfriends ...”

“... more recent Erics – Ambler, Sykes, Shipton, Heffer – oozed shame when signing their names. John Betjeman, in Summoned by Bells, agonises over Farrar’s ‘mawkish’ and ‘oh-so-melodious’ book through which runs a schoolboy sense of impending ‘Doom! Shivering Doom!’ The doom which Betjeman and his contemporaries at Marlborough dreaded was no ...”