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“... unemployment, mental illness, immigration and policing – now operate mainly in a vacuum. Igor Judge, the former lord chief justice, has described this state of affairs as ‘a threat to the justice system’. Without even basic public scrutiny of what happens in a court case, there is little chance that wrongful convictions or excessive ...”

“... of Peter Wright’s malevolent but fascinating account of his time in British intelligence. The judge even ‘waited for the British journalists to turn up late from their lunches of freshly caught fish washed down by the best Australian Chardonnay before starting the court’s afternoon session’.Sometimes sheer moral outrage drives Norton-Taylor’s ...”

“... Magna Carta when pleading a case before his co-author, Mr Justice (later Lord Chief Justice) Judge, though he lost. As I write, lawyers are planning to invoke Magna Carta in a suit against the lord chancellor, Chris Grayling, arguing that his new court fees amount to selling justice, forbidden under Clause 40. It is an epic tale, yet one can’t help ...”

“... second wife, a Jewish actress, had caused all sorts of trouble and embarrassment. Her brother, Igor Sats, had been the only person present when Lunacharsky died in Menton in 1933, and could well have murdered him (I wondered at the time if I had understood him correctly, but later heard the same unfounded rumour circulating in the Russian diaspora in ...”

“... frills at all. It’s just as well that some other, more grandiose schemes were never realised, to judge by the plans Alex Scobie has assembled in Hitler’s State Architecture. He is a Classics don and his well-founded thesis is that Hitler’s Neoclassical passion was confined to Roman as opposed to Greek models. The aim was to impose order, to dominate, to ...”

“... presently compounded when Gulban suffers a stroke and becomes their stricken Jehovah, bed-ridden judge of their inadequacies. They suffer from introspection and self-doubt, and their efforts, pathetic or comical, lose the name of action. Father Bosco, a reluctant contender, meditates the possibility of turning the hotel into a haven for elderly priests; Joey ...”

“... the Russian side of the Kroger producers in London and late in 1990 one of its members, Colonel Igor Prelin, then still with the KGB, came to see me and asked if I would be interested in coming to Moscow to discuss writing a book about ‘the Oxford spy ring’ – as distinct from the Cambridge one (Philby, etc). I said that I was. Other matters intervened ...”

“... of the prototype built by the team of scientists, including Andrei Sakharov, which formed around Igor Kurchatov and, shortly after the war, developed an atomic bomb. That reactor was designed to meet Kurchatov’s requirements by the engineer Nikolai Dollezhal and was built at the record speed considered advisable when responding to Stalin’s orders. With ...”

“... at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow as a graduate student working with Igor Tamm, an outstanding theoretician who later won the Nobel Prize. For the next four years he worked in theoretical physics; he gained his doctorate, and became a member of the lab’s staff. In June 1948, Tamm told him the startling news that he was to join a ...”

“... the 82-year-old Forster, visited at King’s, Craft writes: ‘One naturally regards the man as a judge. Even the weather is a subject of adjudication: when I wonder aloud whether the rain has stopped, he settles silver-rimmed spectacles on his nose, goes to the window, says, “I will try to decide.” ’ Long ago the question was asked, did Stravinsky, and ...”

“... naturally talented. Korchnoi wasn’t the only player to defect: Spassky, Tigran Petrosian, Igor Ivanov all went West. It was a winner’s world, and the winnings and the glory were to be had elsewhere. The defectors were traitors and heroes; they were brilliant and wrong-headed. Individual v. empire: the paradigm was cemented in the Cold War, but its ...”

“... Marina Litvinenko pushed for an inquest into her husband’s murder. Robert Owen, a High Court judge, promised an ‘open and fearless’ investigation. In 2013 the foreign secretary, William Hague, made an application for ‘public interest immunity’ – which meant that the government’s classified files on Litvinenko wouldn’t be available to the ...”