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“... But matters were complicated by the fact that British decolonisation entailed a handover of power not to Nigerians as a people – they weren’t a ‘people’ – but to the so-called Hausa-Fulani aristocracy, who represented the interests of the north and would shortly take charge of a ‘federal republic’ four times the size of the UK. This was ...”

“... ruler of Oman and put in his son as a flexible stooge. The CIA toy with a coup against leftists in power in Syria; the British plot the downfall of Nasser and Eden orders MI6 to assassinate him. MI6 covertly back Tshombe’s secession in the murderous Congo civil war and sustain him in power thereafter, in order to secure ...”

“... those failed politicians, Philip and Algernon. The biographies by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Scott are explicitly concerned to get behind the legends. Philip has been mythologised as the model Renaissance and Protestant courtier, whose courage and heroism led to a tragic early death at the battle of Zutphen in 1586. Algernon has been ...”

“... mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power derived from wealth. And the physicality of it all, of the clothes, the coiled hair and the flesh, makes the pictures sexy in a way you do not expect portraits, particularly society portraits, to be. These are likenesses, while owing little to the pursuit ...”

“... could make careers happen. As a book editor at Knopf and the editor of the Quarterly, he had the power to publish his protégés, the clout to be the casting director of a new generation. Working without a pulpit were other top-notch talent scouts and star-makers, such as Gary Fisketjon, the Random House editor who created the trade paperback series Vintage ...”

“... reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not – to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas.Thomas Disch, one of SF’s finest writers and most merciless critics, was more able to ...”

“... that these pleasures are only by-products of the process which is currently concentrating economic power in the hands of a ‘cosmopolitan upper class’ – a small global plutocracy which threatens to undermine democratic welfare states by ensuring that a country which tries to protect its poor from exploitation will end up by depriving them of jobs. There ...”

“... inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being made right in front of him. He couldn’t see it for its ubiquity. Here was the distinctive architecture of its time, derived from countless precedents, with ...”

“... more inclusive, the boundaries of permissible debate were narrowing. Critiques of concentrated power, imperial or plutocratic, became less common. Indeed, the preoccupation with racial and gender identity has hollowed out political language, the void filled by an apparently apolitical alternative – the neoliberal discourse of antiseptic intervention ...”

“... cultural critic, interpreter of Aids, cancer, the cinema, Fascism and pornography, recipient of Jonathan Miller’s burdensome accolade ‘probably the most intelligent woman in America’, why should she want to attempt a historical novel? It’s been a success of course. There have been the entries into the bestseller lists, the interviews and profiles in ...”

“... England was, in the memorable phrase of Sellar and Yeatman, ‘Top Nation’: both an imperial power and the first industrial nation. Sellar and Yeatman’s comic masterpiece 1066 and All That (1930) poked fun at England’s not quite nationalism. But if it’s not nationalism, how should we describe England’s distinctive sense of self? Probably the most ...”

“... be, otherwise we American male novelists wouldn’t keep writing books about them. Let us observe Jonathan Franzen’s latest, in which the eco-maniacal egghead, at long last, gets the girl. Or Jonathan Lethem’s stoned underachievers, with their mad ideas that turn out to be right. David Foster Wallace gave us ...”

“... These biographies of John Gielgud by Jonathan Croall and Sheridan Morley are quite hard to tell apart. They are of much the same size, bear handsome pictures of the actor in old age on the front of their dust-jackets, and are, inevitably, affectionate and indulgent towards their subject. As Dirk Bogarde remarked when Croall consulted him about the work in hand, ‘everybody adored him, so the book might make rather flat reading ...”

“... to experimental testing. That became the conventional wisdom among evolutionists. But no longer. Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist, takes the dispute between Gould and Conway Morris as the starting point for his richly detailed account of pioneering research in experimental evolution. Recent studies, based on field observations as well as direct ...”

“... he allow him to discover it through the intercession of the wise woman? Did she really have the power to conjure demons from the depths, and if so which side was she working for? How could she compel the spirit of Samuel to appear at her bidding, and anyway what was he doing in the underworld when he should have been in heaven with the Lord? Saul’s ...”