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“... Nelson Mandela was released from prison on 2 February 1990. On 26 February F.W. de Klerk ordered the dismantling of a South African nuclear weapons programme which very few people knew existed. At the time the country had six uranium bombs and one more under construction. De Klerk had looked into abandoning the programme a year earlier, but Mandela’s release was plainly instrumental in making it happen ...”

“... Their aim​ is that we accept a capacity of ten thousand separative work units which is equivalent to ten thousand centrifuges of the older type that we already have,’ Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said on 4 June. ‘Our officials say we need 190,000 SWU. Perhaps this is not a need this year or in two years or five years, but this is the country’s absolute need ...”

“... wanted some desert. He said to one of his daughters: ‘Is there a stale cookie around to give to Jeremy?’ A Clockwork Orange had just opened in France and there was a review Kubrick asked me to translate. Words like ‘genius’ flowed through it. When I finished he remarked: ‘I could have used a few more ...”

“... I graduated from Harvard with a degree in mathematics in 1951 and got my PhD in physics in 1955. I needed a job and a friend made a suggestion: on the Harvard campus there was a relatively modest cyclotron, simple enough for graduate students to operate. There was a position open for a ‘house theorist’. My friend recommended me and I got the job ...”

“... he considered himself to be from recognisably the same world as Hastings. His latest biographer, Jeremy Bernstein, on the other hand, writes very much as an outsider, though one with a long journalistic interest in India and Tibet. It’s clear that he and his publishers take a distinctly distant attitude to older, predominantly British perspectives on ...”

“... from Greenham Common, around Aldermaston to ROF Burghfield. As Eckart Conze, Martin Klimke and Jeremy Varon write in Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s, in the autumn of 1983 five million people across Western Europe demonstrated against the deployment of Nato’s cruise missiles.2 On 12 June 1982, more than a million people ...”

“... palpable kind) an ‘unhealable rift between a human being and a native place’, and Hilda Bernstein has chosen the title of her book with this in mind. It contains roughly a hundred testimonies by South African exiles. From the end of the Fifties to 1990, large numbers of people (‘30,000? 60,000? – nobody knew exactly’) were outside the country ...”

“... are no more than pious mouthings; who, really, wants to read an authorised biography? So take Jeremy Treglown’s apologia at the beginning of his Dahl biography with a pinch of salt. Ophelia Dahl plans to write the authorised version of her father’s life, with the approval of his second wife, Felicity, who asked friends and relatives not to co-operate ...”

“... and cerebral quality of much of Zukofsky’s own poetry. Zukofsky, like Charles Olson and Jeremy Prynne, is a monstre sacré: his reputation precludes any serious discussion of individual pieces of work. The project is the thing, not a particular piece of writing. How we feel about Zukofsky is affected by how we feel about difficulty, a quality ...”