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“... not register on the watchdogs’ computer screens. Despite this, in May, the CIA director, Michael Hayden, claimed that al-Qaida had suffered a ‘near-strategic defeat’. And the British government’s National Security Strategy, released in March, concluded that terrorism ‘does not at present amount to a strategic threat’. Those confident ...”

“... is worse than her bite, and several stories, including Ugrešić’s, have her using her magic powers on behalf of strays or her protégés. Ugrešić is a parodist with many voices, and gives her translators a tricky task: in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, the ends of chapters echo the traditional storyteller’s rhyming envois (‘What about us? We keep ...”

“... likely to put modern readers in mind of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other pop stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna.’ Yes, precisely. From the outset Liszt is characterised as a celeb whose life was bounded by the 19th-century equivalents of the private jet, the billion dollar yacht and the bevy of air-brained blondes. It’s true that there was a ...”

“... selection preserves an argument between Polyidus and Minos over whether Polyidus should use his powers to revive Glaucus. Their discussion hinges on the limits of human knowledge and the abuse of power. Minos advances a theory of natural kingship: just as the dolphin rules over the sea, the eagle over birds and Zeus over the gods, the tyrant commands those ...”

“... the politics of deconstruction are notoriously open to dispute, claimants on the left (like Michael Ryan) asserting its indispensability to Marxist critique, while others – among them Terry Eagleton – see it as merely a last-ditch retreat from pressing social and political realities. But it is certainly a central part of Derrida’s project to ...”

“... Shallows. Carr thinks that he was himself an unwitting victim of the computer’s mind-altering powers. Now in his early fifties, he describes his life as a ‘two-act play’, ‘Analogue Youth’ followed by ‘Digital Adulthood’. In 1986, five years out of college, he dismayed his wife by spending nearly all their savings on an early version of the ...”

“... David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally ...”

“... An indication of the prevailing climate within MI5 is given by the fact that it was in 1975 that Michael Bettaney (later jailed for trying, unsuccessfully, to sell secrets to the KGB) was recruited. What is usually forgotten in the Pincheresque version of events is that Bettaney was a deeply unstable young man, committed to the extreme Right. Having failed ...”

“... was the 1950s. The Royal Navy was no longer the largest in the world – the two great Cold War powers had overtaken it – but its history as ‘the pre-eminent sea-fighting force of the post-1500 world’, in the words of Christopher McKee, resonated still in school history books, comics and war films (Officer with mug: ‘Cocoa, sir?’ Officer with ...”

“... representative democracies complete with civil rights, elected parliaments, separation of powers, alternation of governments. Under the benevolent but watchful eye of the Commission, seeing to it that criteria laid down at the Copenhagen Summit of 1993 were properly met, Eastern Europe has been shepherded into the comity of free nations. There was no ...”

“... position as the Government Critic, ‘the head of the literary police’. While not exercising the powers of Count Benkendorf in Russia, who was to control and paternalise the genius of Pushkin, Gifford and others like him were indeed powerful agents for the forces of reaction; and they were hypocrites too, because they never admitted what Hazlitt rightly ...”

“... Marlowe, in his stale office in Downtown, snarling alternately at the punk scum and the powers-that-be, was a political time-bomb waiting to explode. In their agony and panic no less than 100,000 bedrock Republicans crossed the lines in 1934 to vote for the socialist Upton Sinclair in his gubernatorial campaign conducted under the slogan ‘End ...”

“... Pergamon by the American firm Leasco. It is now widely thought that the inspectors exceeded their powers, and the rules have been tightened up. Subsequent to this, he was voted out of the Pergamon chair. As Labour MP for Buckingham from 1964 to 1970, Maxwell had brazenly insisted on making his maiden speech a couple of hours after taking his seat. For a long ...”

“... veto an honour for Edward Heath or Harold Macmillan than Tory dons would veto Harold Wilson. Even Michael Foot might have slipped through as a representative of the old order, a Thirties-ish, literary champion of the supremacy of Parliament, who caused offence mainly by mistaking the Cenotaph for the Aldermaston March. But Tony Benn of Westminster School and ...”

“... for progressive devolution, it does not break entirely new ground: the concept of ‘reserved powers’ goes back to Gladstone’s Home Rule Bills, and a multi-stage process was built into the 1920 Government of Ireland Act with its provision for a Council of Ireland. The mechanics of the new proposals, however, are more sophisticated, and allow workable ...”