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“... or two, the people wake up, and the ship of state slowly rights itself. The British historian Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, published in 1987, offers a very different view. This is not the story of twenty to thirty-year cycles of intervention and laissez-faire, but of two to three hundred-year cycles of imperial ascendancy and ...”

“... to economic stagnation. Either way America had nothing to fear.In his cool-headed history, Schism, Paul Blustein takes issue with both these interpretations. So too do Bob Davis and Lingling Wei in their more journalistic account, Superpower Showdown. With hindsight it is clear that the policymakers of the 1990s and early 2000s did get some things wrong. They ...”

“... long terms of imprisonment, was already forgotten (Hudson tells us) in the Thirties, when it still lay within the field of living memory. Even the 1984-5 miners’ strike, passionately supported in the village, is now, it seems, on the way to becoming a blank. ‘It was all such a short time ago, but how little evidence there was of that zeal and passion in ...”

“... have studied it, the businessmen who have traded it, the doctors who have prescribed it, and the lay people whose lives it has so dramatically affected’. The ‘scandals that killed thousands of haemophiliacs and recipients of transfusions’ form the story’s dénouement. The moral, according to Starr, is that the safe use of this ‘precious, mysterious ...”

“... While it professes to engineer one paradigm shift after another, it does so for the benefit of the lay imagination to which its appeal is addressed. Management thinking is superior to merely rational science in that it brings the lifeworld along with it. It entails no break with everyday experience; there is no question of having to ‘save the ...”

“... have put myself into a position where I may be forced to lie. In 1964, Cheever invited the writer Paul Moor, who was a fan of his work, up to his hotel room in Berlin. ‘I think he was or may be a homosexual,’ he wrote to a friend about Moor. ‘This would account for the funny shoes and the tight pants and I thought his voice a note or two too ...”

“... was governed by the duties of ‘office’ and by careful gradations of ‘place’ whose origins lay in the hierarchy of feudal allegiance. So the relation between master and servant provided a template for almost every kind of affiliation: between king and courtier, ruler and subject, patron and client, commander and soldier, employer and apprentice, or ...”

“... and only achieve form when one steps back. Oddly favourite is a portrait of the (unappealing) Pope Paul III in a faded rose-coloured cape enthroned on a worn velvet chair, the supreme pontiff just a lay figure there to demonstrate the painter’s skill with his materials. Next to him the irresistible portrait of the ...”

“... impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied ...”

“... of their specialities. If I do not dwell on these – and they are as fascinating to the lay reader as any afterdinner conversation with a captive doctor – or on the equally absorbing chapters on epidemiology and on Scottish and American litigation, it is because they are in the end individual windows onto the courtroom, and it is in the courtroom ...”

“... interest which research into other people’s attitudes and behaviours holds for us). But in this lay the spur to utter opinions. Writers do not bother to set down views which they consider to be shared by most people in their society. Though it will often suit them, as a rhetorical ploy, to present their beliefs as if they commanded wide support, writers are ...”

“... 1796-7, did the civilisation of food come to power. This is the hypothesis of the historian Jean-Paul Aron, in a remarkable book called Le Mangeur du XIXe siècle.12 When the princes of the Ancien Régime set off into exile, they left behind them armies of chefs, sauciers and pâtissiers. These unemployed masters founded the Parisian restaurants which ...”

“... embraces his nihilist conclusions while failing to grasp the structured genealogy of concepts that lay behind it. ‘Concentrating on Nietzschian perspectivism, on truth as rhetorical value, Foucault would blind us to the truth both of Nietzsche’s and of his own rhetoric.’ Post-structuralism is deluded if it thinks to arrive at this position ...”

“... he could not write verse. This precluded him from any success in the theatre even if he did lay claim to having invented the three-act play. The parallel careers of Lope de Vega and Shakespeare eloquently demonstrate this bottom line of Golden Age aesthetics: ineffective playwrights turned experimental novelists did not get state funerals or build New ...”

“... which was at least predicated on dialogue and conversation. Adorno’s sometime collaborator Paul Lazarsfeld had the opposite worry: broadcasts may cause their listeners to feel informed about the world, and the listeners may mistake their new understanding for political action.Debates​ over the BBC’s formation, now a hundred years old, are not of ...”