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“... in 1967. His house stands within two sets of walls, those of the ancient Armenian convent of St James and, beyond them, the Turkish walls of Jerusalem’s old city. The convent is a haven, in the same sense Israel calls itself a haven, in which descendants of Armenians who escaped Turkey’s First World War massacres still live. When he was director of the ...”

“... a range of possible roles and identifications’. The tone of her essay is free but also stern – oddly governmental. Carter’s work is ‘reponsive but not random fun’. Flesh and the Mirror is a patchy book, and most of the essays are so far from the spring of creativity that it does little more than sprinkle them with the occasional generous ...”

“... He studied the best he could find, including Kenny Everett and Steve Wright in the UK, and Howard Stern, king of the shock-jocks, in the US. All three were wacky, eccentric rule-breakers, and in the case of Everett and Stern risqué by the standards of their contemporaries. But Moyles saw that this wasn’t what made them ...”

“... which the projection of sovereign power and ideology was the driver of overseas expansion? Philip Stern’s commanding history of British corporate imperialism suggests that the question is poorly framed. In an earlier book, he influentially presented the East India Company as a ‘company-state’, a hybrid uniquely successful in making government its ...”

“... a baronetcy as a reward for having pressganged a hundred men into service in the Irish War under James the First.   ‘Is that too myth?’ Goethe asked.   ‘No, Your Excellency, that is history.’   ‘Honourable history!’ said Goethe.   ‘Well, Your Excellency,’ the Englishman replied, ‘he put greater value on the title of nobility ...”

“... we realise how mistaken the matrons have been. Miss Marsalles’s soft-headedness is actually a stern charity. And the ‘great unemotional happiness’ which the music speaks is hers. The mothers go home, stilled by this incursion, by this ‘communiqué from the other country where she lives’. The prose of these stories is not lavish: it is ...”

“... to us of Langland’s great narrative poem, with its hopping between Middle English and Latin, its stern morality and its rebuke to greedy, sensual materialists who ignore the punitive divine message of the plague, is a jarring moment that’s hard to read as anything other than a sudden anger towards God: ‘For God is deaf nowadays and deigneth not us to ...”

“... a non-commissioned vice-sergeant but the Kaiser now promoted him to captain, and, as the physicist James Franck said, he learned ‘to think like a general’. A scientific collaborator, the British chemist J.E. Coates, wrote that ‘the war years were for Haber the greatest period of his life . . . To be a great soldier, to obey and be obeyed – that, as ...”

“... Blake Morrison begins his account of the murder of James Bulger with a delicate diversion into the story of the Children’s Crusade. The year 1212: at Saint-Denis, a boy of 12 begins to preach. He has received word from God that it is the mission of Christian children to free the Holy Land from the infidel. He draws crowds, draws followers: boys and girls swarm from street and field ...”

“... Morningside Heights there’s an enormous residential tower which in 1932 replaced the Henry James, an apartment house built at the turn of the 20th century and advertised to appeal to ‘refined persons’. When William Dean Howells first told James about the building, James replied ...”

“... 80, and apparently considering a return to Greenland, to write – if such delirious symmetry and stern purpose can be believed – the story of his boyhood in Togo.‘With a heavy heart, I joined the other passengers below.’ The mystery, as often, is the return journey. We don’t understand why he woke up. The journey out – the dream – is amply, even ...”

“... enough, through barter with the ruthless invaders. Women and children squat at the feet of stern warriors with pudding-basin haircuts. These were taken before Stahl arrived to strike his duplicitous deal with the overlords of the Peruvian Corporation. He would be allowed to establish missions and schools, nucleated settlements, colonies within the ...”

“... blood: the shocking execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 and the debilitating nosebleeds of James II, which prevented him from defending his crown at Salisbury against William, his son-in-law as well as his nephew. The caesura comes on 30 January 1649 with the public execution of Charles I. A Dutch pamphleteer punned that the English (Anglorum) could no ...”

“... canvas by his son Winston, and once in a delicate line-drawing of the 1950s, by Robert Rhodes James. But all this time, as Roy Foster’s book makes plain, another Lord Randolph has lain concealed by the conventions of portraiture. Winston, to whom his father was a divinity but also a stranger, wanted to prove that Lord Randolph possessed all the ...”

“... for invasion and insurrection than those surprised Americans at Pearl Harbor. The movie (and James Jones’s novel, on which it was based) presented that peace-time army as a community wherein a vicious and slothful officer might neglect his duties, turning over his responsibilities to the Top Sergeant, while the Other Ranks (or the Enlisted Men, as the ...”