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“... of his senior cabinet member is made on more than casual acquaintance. It is well-known that John F. Kennedy met Dean Rusk for the first time when he interviewed him for the job: Reagan and Haig had seen each other three times before the Election of 1980 but on only one of these occasions, shortly before Reagan’s nomination, had there been anything ...”

“... with ‘the corduroy panzers’; dismisses the Poet Laureate as ‘poor old John Masefield’. Nor do the members of his own coterie fare much better. He is ‘wholly unsympathetic’ to Charles Williams’s mind, and although he has many warm and generous things to say about C.S. Lewis there comes a point at which he judges that ‘his ...”

“... survive in dignity, and a new novel was his only chance of getting it. Here, therefore, lies the major editorial crux of Women in Love. Did Lawrence’s feelings about homoeroticism change from 1916 to 1919, so that the Prologue became out of date and he freely discarded it? Or did he see that the truth revealed in the Prologue would destroy his career, so ...”

“... persecution of Catholics in the area was renewed. Hughes notes that Shakespeare’s father, John, was a recusant, and he also accepts as genuine a Spiritual Testament, found in 1784 and signed by John Shakespeare, which was a declaration of loyalty to the Catholic faith (Milward makes a convincing case for the ...”

“... the moral vacuum familiar at the core of today’s conurbations. If nowadays British cities and major towns just about hang together, they do so more by successive applications of sticking-plaster than inherent unity or necessity. In his epilogue, Daunton toys with the argument that cities can no longer be meaningfully identified. ‘There is no place for ...”

“... money, to invest in property: Umbria became a particular favourite, as did the high streets of major cities. Ignorant of foreign languages, unfamiliar with international banking practices, the semi-literate Calabrians could supply cocaine to distributors but turned to the Sicilians to launder their profits. With a century of experience in the export trade ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... shells on mountains, but the Flood was itself thought of in a variety of ways. Writing in 1695, John Woodward, an English physician and fossil collector, proposed that it resulted from a temporary suspension of gravity, during which all the materials of the Earth were churned up into a thick suspension. When gravity returned, the materials settled into the ...”

“... court, thus restoring the element of personal interaction to politics, and to government too. John Guy and others subjected the ideology and praxis of the Cromwellian reforms to detailed scrutiny. Insofar as English government was reinvented, anticipating and partly realising the emergence of the state as a public thing, the whole credit was not ...”

“... rented an adult film on motel pay-per-view. They were the victims of ‘total surveillance’, as John Parker calls it. Yet it mattered little – Atta’s driver’s licence may not have been in order but there were some 200,000 outstanding traffic warrants in Broward County. The attacks of 11 September both reinforced and exploded the fashionable myth that ...”

“... the depth of the greatest geological faultline in European civilisation. MacCulloch’s other major contention is demanding of the imaginative powers of his readers, many of whom will find themselves excluded from the mental, and especially the theological world of the 16th and 17th centuries. This was before all else a religious revolution, not to be ...”

“... restructure and reform the prisons in Iraq, including Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, both condemned by Major-General Antonio Taguba as the sites of ‘egregious acts and grave breaches of international law’. Or that Terry Stewart, the former director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, who began the now prohibited practice of ‘dog frights’ in the ...”

“... from Flanders to Damaraland in southern Africa, fetching, carrying and fighting, as the three major European powers mortgaged their empires on the Western Front. Germany was scandalised by the deployment of ‘barbarians’ in Europe, both at the time and later. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Hitler gave orders to destroy a statue of Mangin in the ...”

“... airport on 3 January, wasn’t the head of a terrorist organisation but a state official: a major-­general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the leader of its Quds Force, the unit re­spons­ible for external and clandestine oper­at­ions. He was a pivotal player in the reg­ion and, at times, its most brilliant military strategist. Iran’s ...”

“... He dissected aspects of French intellectual and political life in long review-essays in the major periodicals, notably La Revue des deux mondes. Two collections of these pieces, Essais de morale et de critique (1859), and then La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (1871), established him as one of the most respected commentators on the ...”