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In response to be asked about Boris Johnson becoming UK Prime Minister...
"I'm delighted. As the UK continues to plunge ever faster into a future akin to a dystopian novel I'll never run out of material to write more books. Although now that reality is more bizarre than fiction maybe plot-lines will need to be more ambitious. Perhaps a book where Boris Johnson is really an accidental sentient snafu of Trump's scrotum lint. Kind of a sequel to the Bush-Blair story. I see musical rights being drawn up as we speak.
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R.D. Ronald
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Oh what a wanker I am the greatest wanker of 'em all!
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Boris Johnson
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Everyone says it's going to be Snapcase at the palace. He listens to the people."
"Yeah, right," said Vimes. And I listen to the thunder. But I don't do anything about it.
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Terry Pratchett (Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6))
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He’s lovely,” I say, putting my hand out to the dog. “What’s his name?”
“Boris Johnson.”
I blink. “Pardon?”
He smiles. “Because he’s blond and stupid and makes very questionable decisions.
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Lily Morton (Oz (Finding Home, #1))
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It turned out that in the governance of a nation’s security, many absurd situations had to be worked around: a toxic clown in the Foreign Office [Boris Johnson], a state visit by a narcissistic bed-wetter [Trump], the tendency of the electorate to 'jump off' the occasional cliff [Brexit].
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Mick Herron (Joe Country (Slough House, #6))
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I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.
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Boris Johnson
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Meanwhile London Mayor Boris Johnson ‘joked’ that women only go to university because ‘they’ve got to find men to marry’ (hilarious, no?) and
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Laura Bates (Everyday Sexism)
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Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity. It has been said that the difference between Hitler’s speeches and Churchill’s speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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The key thing is to be "Conservative in principle but Liberal in sympathy".
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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Boris Johnson delivered an unexpectedly jaunty press conference in which he assured an anxious nation we would ‘turn the tide within the next twelve weeks’ and ‘send coronavirus packing in this country’, as though it were some unwanted door-to-door salesman.
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Rachel Clarke (Breathtaking)
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I plea with the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr. Boris Johnson. He ought to look at the following law - The Age of Marriage Act 1929 which has caused many unwanted or forced marriages by their wicked parents. It is horrific to see an outdated law in this era.
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Miriam Farid
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There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
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Boris Johnson
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Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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May loses her majority and is effectively left on life support for the rest of her premiership. (Boris Johnson spends a lot of time hanging around the plug socket looking shifty.)
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Marina Hyde (What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times)
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If the surprise outcome of the recent UK referendum - on whether to leave or remain in the European Union - teaches us anything, it is that supposedly worthy displays of democracy in action can actually do more harm than good. Witness a nation now more divided; an intergenerational schism in the making; both a governing and opposition party torn to shreds from the inside; infinitely more complex issues raised than satisfactory solutions provided. It begs the question 'Was it really all worth it' ?
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Alex Morritt (Impromptu Scribe)
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London is—after Athens and Rome—the third most influential city in history.
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Boris Johnson (Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World)
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He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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In the words of Mr Thierry Coup of Warner Bros: 'We are taking the most iconic and powerful moments of the stories and putting them in an immersive environment. It is taking the theme park experience to a new level.' And of course I wish Thierry and his colleagues every possible luck, and I am sure it will be wonderful. But I cannot conceal my feelings; and the more I think of those millions of beaming kids waving their wands and scampering the Styrofoam turrets of Hogwartse_STmk, and the more I think of those millions of poor put-upon parents who must now pay to fly to Orlando and pay to buy wizard hats and wizard cloaks and wizard burgers washed down with wizard meade_STmk, the more I grind my teeth in jealous irritation.
Because the fact is that Harry Potter is not American. He is British. Where is Diagon Alley, where they buy wands and stuff? It is in London, and if you want to get into the Ministry of Magic you disappear down a London telephone box. The train for Hogwarts goes from King's Cross, not Grand Central Station, and what is Harry Potter all about? It is about the ritual and intrigue and dorm-feast excitement of a British boarding school of a kind that you just don't find in America. Hogwarts is a place where children occasionally get cross with each other—not 'mad'—and where the situation is usually saved by a good old British sense of HUMOUR. WITH A U. RIGHT? NOT HUMOR. GOTTIT?
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Boris Johnson
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You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.
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Boris Johnson
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There is an African fly that lays its eggs in the jelly of children's eyes, the hatching larvae blinding them by feeding on the eye itself. But the fly has no quarrel with the child. It is merely following its nature.
Likewise, Boris Johnson, a vile grub laying his horrible eggs in the soft jelly of the EU debate, has no agenda beyond his own advancement. He believes in nothing, and neither does his spiritual soulmate, the eye-scoffing African fly.
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Stewart Lee (March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019)
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Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism—that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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Fan clubs and websites in praise of Boris were springing up all over the place – run by both Home Counties mothers and northern university students. (The Durham University Fan Club was just one that had as its mission ‘the admiration, promotion and discussion of Boris Johnson.’)
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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Reaching out to immigrants promotes national security. Following the
July 7, 2005, London subway suicide bombings by British-born Muslim
terrorists, Boris Johnson, a member of Parliament, noted that Americans
did not grow their own suicide bombers, giving credit to Americans
for acculturating its immigrants.
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Bill Ong Hing (Deporting our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy)
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Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet?
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Boris Johnson
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He’s quite empathetic when he wants to be, clever at judging other people’s moods.
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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The Shakespearean theatre was the product of the entrepreneurial maritime culture of the age,
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Boris Johnson (Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World)
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Lear’s daughters and their loathsome husbands are all deservedly slaughtered for their ill treatment of an aged ruler (one of the reasons that tragedy remains so huge in Asia)
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Boris Johnson (Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World)
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You are governed by incompetents.
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Steven Magee
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Ambrose Bierce’s famous description of politics as ‘the conduct of public affairs for private advantage’.
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Peter Oborne (The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism)
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There was one thing the public could say for certain about Churchill: that there was nothing that he was going to ask the British armed forces to do that he would not have done himself.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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As Boris Johnson has pointed out, it’s now an offence to swear at a police officer. So should you incur a public-spirited 50,000-volt warning shot – perhaps for brandishing your pension book in an aggressive manner or because a young PC has mistaken your tartan shopping trolley for a piece of field artillery – don’t accidentally shout “Oh fuck!” or you might get sent to prison.
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David Mitchell (Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons from Modern Life)
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My hero is the mayor in Jaws. He's a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it's demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course, he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but his instincts were right.'
Boris Johnson is the mayor of London.
Taken from Time Magazine interview: June 25, 2012; page 76.
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Boris Johnson
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David Lloyd George had been to Germany, and been so dazzled by the Führer that he compared him to George Washington. Hitler was a ‘born leader’, declared the befuddled former British Prime Minister. He wished that Britain had ‘a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today’. This from the hero of the First World War! The man who had led Britain to victory over the Kaiser!
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest; and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.
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Boris Johnson
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These days we dimly believe that the Second World War was won with Russian blood and American money; and though that is in some ways true, it is also true that, without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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Take the one about the time he was sitting next to a clean-living Methodist bishop—at a reception, allegedly, in Canada—when a good-looking young waitress came up and offered them both a glass of sherry from a tray. Churchill took one. But the bishop said, ‘Young lady, I would rather commit adultery than take an intoxicating beverage.’ At which point Churchill beckoned the girl, and said, ‘Come back, lassie, I didn’t know we had a choice.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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Claiming to feel ‘eirenic’ (peace-seeking) and ‘ataraxic’ (serenely indiffererent) about Evans’ and Young’s act of perfidiousness, he declared: ‘I’m certainly issuing no instructions to staff about it. It will not be deemed an act of disloyalty to go and see
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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After dismissing the recorder as ‘girly’ at the age of 11, in an effort to ‘express my musical personality,’ as he puts it, he tackled the trombone.38 His considerable wind power went in one end, but out of the other came only parps and what he refers to as a ‘soft, windy afflatus.
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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On the morning after that referendum, Friday June 24, 2016, a group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs met in the Boothroyd Room in Portcullis House. Some were simply jubilant. Some were struggling to assess what it meant. Everyone seemed to assume that the argument was over. So I stood up and gave a warning.
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Boris Johnson (Unleashed)
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However, for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what we think. They are about what we feel. And when it comes to feelings, Einstein and Dawkins are no better than anyone else. Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound “free will,” that this “free will” is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free. Like Einstein and Dawkins, an illiterate maid also has free will, and therefore on election day her feelings—represented by her vote—count just as much as anybody else’s. Feelings guide not just voters but their leaders as well. In the 2016 Brexit referendum the Leave campaign was headed by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. After David Cameron resigned, Gove initially supported Johnson for the premiership, but at the very last minute Gove declared Johnson unfit for the position and announced his own intention to run for it. Gove’s action, which destroyed Johnson’s chances, was described as a Machiavellian political assassination.4 But Gove defended his conduct by appealing to his feelings, explaining, “In every step in my political life I have asked myself one question: ‘What is the right
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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Accident, agree, bagpipe, blunder, box, chant, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, femininity, finally, funeral, horizon, increase, infect, obscure, observe, princess, scissors, superstitious, universe, village: those are just some of the everyday words that Chaucer introduced to the language through his poetry.
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Boris Johnson (Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World)
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(Never in the field of human conflict has) So much been owed by So many to So few. If you want a classic ascending tricolon, then try his peerless line from 1942, after the victory at El Alamein. Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. When he uncorks this one at the
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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Os defeitos e vícios dos líderes populistas se transformam, aos olhos dos eleitores, em qualidades. Sua inexperiência é a prova de que eles não pertencem ao círculo corrompido das elites. E sua incompetência é vista como garantia de autenticidade. As tensões que eles produzem em nível internacional ilustram sua independência, e as fake news que balizam sua propaganda são a marca de sua liberdade de espírito. No mundo de Donald Trump, de Boris Johnson e de Jair Bolsonaro, cada novo dia nasce com uma gafe, uma polêmica, a eclosão de um escândalo. Mal se está comentando um evento, e esse já é eclipsado por um outro, numa espiral infinita que catalisa a atenção e satura a cena midiática.
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Giuliano da Empoli (Os engenheiros do caos)
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I hear that there are plans afoot to produce a remake of Hans Christian Andersen's classic - 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. Who better to star in the leading role than recently defrocked Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson ? A narcissist with such naked ambition; an opportunist with such threadbare morals; a disgraced politician with such thinly veiled contempt for the British electorate, and judging by the sycophantic praise they heap on each other, arguably cut from the very same cloth as Donald Trump. Despite laughable pretensions of having the stature and fortitude of a modern day Churchill, he cuts a now lonely figure, a mere insignificant shadow. Boris, you can't hide anymore. Your warts and all are exposed for the whole world to see.
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Alex Morritt (Lines & Lenses)
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Some in Downing Street say it is now accepted that – unless Cameron falls victim to events – Boris will not get a chance to challenge for the leadership until after the Prime Minister wants to move on. At least initially, Downing Street sources refused to give a ‘moment’s thought’ to Boris not serving a second term as Mayor: ‘We just believe he will win.’ In the Tory high command, thoughts were already turning to a potential Boris v. George Osborne contest after 2016, when it is believed likely that Cameron will step down to ‘pursue other interests’. But as the architect of the Cameron government’s divisive austerity plan, Osborne may find himself ruled out and in any case, chancellors rarely go on to make a success of the top slot. Moreover,
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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I remember a dinner party when he spent the whole time writing an article. At a requiem concert in the cathedral, he spent his whole time writing notes. At a wedding disco, Boris was going round interviewing people for his column while Marina was breast-feeding. He is completely driven. He has an ability to focus on one thing, no matter what human beings may be in the way.’ Boris
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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I have never seen anyone who is tougher behind the eyes than him in a billion years of interviewing. He is clearly a right piece of work. He’s completely under control – except in one area, where women are concerned. He made no attempt to engage at all, and avoided answering all the questions. His bluster and wit serves to obscure his real politics, which are nasty. He is a charmingly evasive and ruthless customer.
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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It was the eternal contest for reputation and prestige that encouraged Londoners to endow new hospitals or write great plays or crack the problem of longitude for the navy. No matter how agreeable your surroundings, you couldn’t get famous by sitting around in some village, and that is still true today. You need people to acknowledge what you have done; you need a gallery for the applause; and above all you need to know what everyone else is up to.
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Boris Johnson (Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World)
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Churchill decides from very early on that he will create a political position that is somehow above left and right, embodying the best points of both sides and thereby incarnating the will of the nation. He thinks of himself as a gigantic keystone in the arch, with all the lesser stones logically induced to support his position. He has a kind of semi-ideology to go with it—a leftish Toryism: imperialist, romantic, but on the side of the working man.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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And although the effects were not yet visible, he also seemed to have gone back on his word to stop seemingly randomly scattered skyscrapers from trashing the city’s skyline. ‘Erectile disorder seems the occupational disease of London mayors,’ railed the commentator Simon Jenkins about Boris’s new-found enthusiasm for towers.12 As soon as Boris had taken occupancy of ‘the testicle’ (his own nickname for the elliptical City Hall), he ‘craved a phallus.’ He
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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Cybele, or the Great Mother—Magna Mater. This Cybele was supposed to have conceived a passion for a young man named Atys, and when Atys failed to respond to her advances, she became jealous. When she caught him having it off with someone else, she drove him so mad that he castrated himself. I am afraid that respectable young Londoners had celebrated their devotion to Magna Mater by doing the same—and we know this for sure because the river near London Bridge has also yielded a fearful set of serrated forceps, adorned with the heads of Eastern divinities.
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Boris Johnson (Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World)
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First Lord of the Admiralty, long enough to engineer what an anti-Churchillian would say was an epic and unparalleled military disaster—a feat of incompetent generalship that made the Charge of the Light Brigade look positively slick. It was an attempt to outflank the stalemate on the Western Front that not only ended in humiliation for the British armed forces; it cost the lives of so many Australians and New Zealanders that to this day their 1915 expedition to Turkey is the number-one source of pom-bashing and general anti-British feeling among Antipodeans.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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Frustrato, Doug tentò un’altra strada. “Ascolta, supponiamo che la maggioranza voti per la Brexit e noi...”
“Scusami se ti interrompo,” disse Nigel. “Supponiamo che la maggioranza voti per cosa?”
“Brexit.”
Nigel lo guardò sbalordito. “Come mai salti fuori con questa parola?”
“Non è così che la chiamano tutti?”
“Credevo che si dicesse Brixit.”
“Cosa? Brixit?”
“Noi diciamo così.”
“Noi... chi?”
“Dave e tutto il gruppo.”
“Tutti dicono Brexit. Da dove viene Brixit?”
“Non lo so. Pensavo che si dicesse così.” Di nuovo prese un appunto sul taccuino. “Brexit? Sei sicuro?”
“Sicurissimo. È una parola composta. British exit.”
“British exit... Allora dovrebbe essere Brixit?”
“Be’, i greci l’hanno chiamata Grexit.”
“I greci? Non sono usciti dall’Unione europea.”
“No, ma hanno valutato la possibilità di farlo.”
“Noi non siamo i greci. Dovremmo avere una parola che sia unicamente nostra?”
“Ce l’abbiamo. Brexit.”
“Ma noi continuiamo a dire Brixit.” Scuotendo la testa, Nigel continuò a scrivere. “Sarà una notizia bomba nel prossimo consiglio dei ministri. Spero che non tocchi a me comunicarlo.”
“A che ti serve avere una definizione se sei sicuro che la cosa non succederà?” gli domandò Doug.
Nigel sorrise felice. “Naturale... hai ragione da vendere. Non succederà e quindi non ci serve definirla.”
“Ecco, vedi.”
“Dopotutto, tra un anno, nessuno si ricorderà più di questa stupida faccenda.”
“Esattamente.”
“Nessuno si ricorderà che qualcuno voleva la Brixit.”
“Proprio così. Però, sai, alcuni di loro...” Si chiese come dovesse metterla. “Sono personaggi da prendere sul serio, no? Boris Johnson, per esempio. Un vero peso massimo.”
“Non infierire sul suo aspetto fisico,” disse Nigel. “Anche se Dave è molto arrabbiato con lui.”
“Non si aspettava che si pronunciasse a favore dell’uscita?”
“No, non se l’aspettava.”
“Gira voce che la sera prima che il ‘Telegraph’ andasse in stampa, Boris avesse preparato due articoli – uno in cui sosteneva l’uscita e l’altro in cui si dichiarava favorevole a restare nell’Unione europea.”
“Non ci credo per niente,” disse Nigel. “Boris avrebbe preparato tre articoli: uno per uscire, l’altro per restare e il terzo perché non riusciva a decidere. Gli piace essere sempre pronto.”“E poi c’è Michael Gove. Un altro attaccante che si è pronunciato a favore dell’uscita.”
“Lo so. Dave è arrabbiatissimo con Michael. Per fortuna rimangono molti conservatori leali e di buon senso che apprezzano i benefici di restare membri della UE. Credo che tu vada a letto con una di loro. Ma prova a immaginare cosa pensa Dave di Michael e di alcuni altri. Insomma, è andato a Bruxelles, è tornato con un accordo assai vantaggioso, e questi non sono ancora contenti.”
“Semplice: a molti non va giù la UE,” disse Doug. “Pensano che non sia democratica.”
“Sì, ma uscirne sarebbe un male per l’economia.”
“Pensano che la Germania comandi a bacchetta su tutti.”
“Sì, ma uscirne sarebbe un male per l’economia.”
“Pensano che dalla Polonia e dalla Romania siano arrivati troppi immigrati che spingono i salari al ribasso.”
“Sì, ma uscirne sarebbe un male per l’economia.”
“D’accordo,” disse Doug. “Credo di avere appena capito quali saranno i tre punti strategici della campagna di Dave.” Adesso era il suo turno di prendere appunti. “E come la mettiamo con Jeremy Corbyn?”
Nigel inspirò con un lungo sibilo e sobbalzò visibilmente. “Jeremy Corbyn?”
“Se il quadro è questo, lui dove si colloca?”
“Preferisco non parlarne.”
“Perché no?”
“Perché no? Perché è un marxista. Marxista, leninista, trotzkista, comunista. Maoista, bolscevico, anarchico, di sinistra. Un socialista fondamentalista, anticapitalista, antimonarchico, pro-terrorismo.”
“Ma è anche uno che vuole rimanere nella UE.”
“Davvero?”
“Così dice.”
“Allora, naturalmente, saremo felici di averlo a bordo. Ma non credo che Dave sarebbe pronto a condividere alcunché sul piano politico.”
“Non sarà necessario. È Jeremy il primo a respingere un accordo di questo tipo.”
“Bene.
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Jonathan Coe (Middle England (Rotters' Club, #3))
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I had lunch with a bunch of posh students Allegra knows, including her boyfriend, a young fogey with a thatch of blond hair and a plummy voice called Boris Johnson.
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Tina Brown (The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade)
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HOSTS: Raymond Edward Johnson until May 22, 1945; Paul McGrath beginning Sept. 28, 1945. Also: House Jameson. CAST: Film stars known for the macabre—Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, etc.—in lead roles, ca. 1941–42. New York radio performers in subsequent leads and in support: Richard Widmark, Larry Haines, Everett Sloane, Lesley Woods, Anne Seymour, Stefan Schnabel, Arnold Moss,
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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In 2011, Boris Johnson, then London’s mayor, saw the downside when the capital’s fringes went on the rampage for several days, smashing up shops and burning cars, looting what they could not have. Five years later Britain’s left-behinds vetoed London’s economic interests in the Brexit referendum.
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Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism)
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Boris Johnson returning as Prime Minister after resigning is like the return of winter after a protracted winter. People want a new season.
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Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
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In 2020 Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published a report on Russian influence in the UK. The report failed to gain as much attention as it deserved thanks in part to Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissing it as an attempt to delegitimise the Brexit referendum. This was a shame because it was a thoughtful analysis of the kind of blind spot that has led Britain to accept money directly from Russian oligarchs, as well as from Russia-allied businessmen like Firtash, without looking into where it comes from.
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Oliver Bullough (Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals)
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When sex is the means of exploitation, there are three methods. The first is seduction that leads to the direct theft of secrets. For example, Ian Clement, deputy to the then mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was caught in a honey trap while in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. He was approached by an attractive woman, agreed to have a couple of drinks, then invited her up to his hotel room.40 There he passed out, apparently drugged, and woke to find his room ransacked for documents and the contents of his BlackBerry downloaded. A top aide to Prime Minister Gordon Brown fell for the same trap in the same year.41 The second method is seduction that leads to blackmail, using compromising photographs. This classic honey trap (meiren ji, literally ‘beautiful person plan’) was perfected by the Russians.42 Though the method is not uncommon, cases rarely come to light.43 In 2017 the former deputy head of MI6, Nigel Inkster, said that China’s agencies were using honey traps more often.44 In 2016 reports suggested that the Dutch ambassador to Beijing had been entrapped.
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Clive Hamilton (Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World)
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Shannon grasped that the administration’s blanket new approach threatened to stifle all the ongoing refugee and immigration programs at a stroke: “The administration announces that people coming from certain countries need to be vetted in a special way or need special visa processing, like Iran. Then you end up with a scientist from Cambridge University in the UK, who’s lived in Great Britain all his life but still has an Iranian passport, suddenly is stopped at Boston airport and told he can’t go to the conference at Harvard. And that person calls Cambridge and Cambridge calls Boris Johnson and Boris Johnson calls somebody, and so there was a whole effort that had to be made to kind of fix what was coming out of the White House. And at that time, in the very early days, General Kelly was at DHS. And I knew Kelly well, from his days first as Leon Panetta’s military aide, but then as US Southern Command combatant commander. And so Kelly and I would get on the phone and say, ‘Okay, how are we going to figure this out?’ So we would create these small working groups, and his staff and my staff would then try to fix what was being presented. So that was a kind of immediate and everyday example of how we tried to fix things.
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David Rothkopf (American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation)
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Churchill. His epic career intersected with the Middle East at several key points (and remember that he is credited with pioneering the very term Middle East); but the most important was his role as Colonial Secretary. He was a little surprised to be offered the post, at the end of 1920; but it is easy to see why Lloyd George thought he was the right man for the job. He had shown immense energy and dynamism as Minister for Munitions—equipping Britain with the tanks, planes and other technology that helped win the war. As Secretary of State for War he had been masterly in his demobilisation strategy: quelling mutinies by ensuring that those who had served the longest were the first to be reunited with their families. He had shown his gifts of charm and persuasion in the pre-war Ulster talks—and those gifts would be needed in spades. The First World War had left some snortingly difficult problems, and especially in the Middle East. — THE POST OF Colonial Secretary might sound less grand than that of Foreign Secretary—a role still occupied by that most superior person, George Nathaniel Curzon. But that is to forget the scale of the British Empire in 1921. The First World War was not meant to be an acquisitive conflict;
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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Щойно ввійшовши до архіву Черчилля в Кембриджі, я ледве стримав крик переляку. Мене зустрів управитель Аллен Пеквуд і, вітаючись, простягнув руку, яка скидалася на штучну. Звісно, манери взяли гору, і я потиснув протез; та враз зрозумів, що він із бронзи.
- Ви щойно потиснули руку Вінстона Черчилля, - промовив Аллен.
Я оглянув лиття і був вражений тим, наскільки воно витончене. Пальці приємної форми, не довгі, не великі.
Це та рука, яка до 52 років так несамовито розмахувала ключкою для поло, стріляла з маузера, керувала гідропланами, розривала колючий дріт на нічийній землі.
Рука, що підписом звалила місто, п'ять пальців, що поклали край режиму.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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Brutality, but also vulgarity. Propaganda, Hitler tells us, must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses . . . All propaganda must be popular, and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to . . . The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan . . . only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.34
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Ferdinand Mount (Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall - From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson)
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In Paris the French president Emmanuel Macron, a former London banker, openly derided the Brexit experiment as a disaster that was based on a pack of lies.
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Boris Johnson (Unleashed)
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Above all, levelling up is about leadership. You need teachers who believe in the potential of their kids, the inspirational figures (we have all had them) who keep alive the flame of our interest and aptitude.
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Boris Johnson (Unleashed)
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Go to the US, and even though there are such huge and famous inequalities of wealth, you will also find a rich and varied sameness, a homogeneity from state to state. The UK is different. For decades London and the rest of the south-east have been way out in front, and too much of the rest of the country has been treated as a kind of economic afterthought, a long comet’s tail of underproductive streets and businesses like the one we were looking at.
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Boris Johnson (Unleashed)
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By the time he came into Downing Street in May 1940 he had written and read so much history as to have a unique understanding of events, to see them in context, and to see what England must do.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor)
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unique understanding
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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on a stool amid his guffawing comrades, ‘I stand for
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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exiguous resources.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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David Ross, the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, was hired as Olympic adviser.
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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There must be room in our world for eccentricity, even if it offends the prudes, and room for the vague other-worldliness that often goes with genius.
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Boris Johnson
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He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,’ wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. ‘Die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and…glory in the possession of India’. Mahatma
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Shashi Tharoor (An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India)
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themselves on the building's famous balcony. Millions more will watch the ceremony and celebrations on live television -- crowded around screens in their homes, at street parties in towns and villages and at major landmarks. Lawmakers are already lobbying London Mayor Boris Johnson to install a giant screen in the city's iconic Trafalgar Square. Britain's Foreign Office said royal officials had sent their regrets to Estibalis Chavez,
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Anonymous
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As for Anna Fazackerley, the stories were to have more painful consequences. No one should doubt that there are casualties in a jolly Johnson jape – and they are usually women (or children).
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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For a maverick, he rebelled against his party a puny five times in his seven years as an MP. When he did so, it was usually taking a more liberal line than the leadership (and, indeed, his own previous positions), such as backing the repeal of the infamous Section 28 ban on the promotion of homosexuality and voting in favour of giving legal status to change of gender for transsexuals. When
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Sonia Purnell (Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: A Biography of Boris Johnson)
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The Commission pressed Churchill: when did he imagine that this would be
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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we use an English word for a farm animal and a French word for the cooked meat it provides.
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Boris Johnson (Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World)
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Every time this happens, I said, every time there is a referendum that goes against the general direction of EU integration – and I cited examples from Denmark, France, Ireland, the Netherlands – the EU establishment always finds a way of overturning that popular decision and forcing people to think again. They will try it here too, I said.
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Boris Johnson (Unleashed)
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Their most important contribution to civilisation is that they were both neglectful of the child.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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The child is father to the man, and gingery young Churchill was a pretty runty sort of kid.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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I’m still struggling to work out whether Boris Johnson represents the interface of the public school system and foetal alcohol syndrome, or what happens when Pixar is infiltrated by the last surviving Nazi war criminal.
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Frankie Boyle (The Future of British Politics)
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Boris & Co must have downed so much beer at that party at Number 10 beer-Downing Street.
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Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
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He’s like Stanley Baldwin,’ thought Travers: ‘I’d rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.’ Just
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Tom Bower (Boris Johnson: The Gambler)
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Visitors to Mason’s Yard in St. James’s will search in vain for Isherwood Fine Arts. They will, however, find the extraordinary Old Master gallery owned by my dear friend Patrick Matthiesen. A brilliant art historian blessed with an infallible eye, Patrick never would have allowed a misattributed work by Artemisia Gentileschi to languish in his storerooms for nearly a half century. The painting depicted in The Cellist does not exist. If it did, it would look a great deal like the one produced by Artemisia’s father, Orazio, that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Like Julian Isherwood and his new managing partner, Sarah Bancroft, the inhabitants of my version of London’s art world are wholly fictitious, as are their sometimes-questionable antics. Their midsummer drinking session at Wiltons Restaurant would have been entirely permissible, as the landmark London eatery briefly reopened its doors before a rise in coronavirus infection rates compelled Prime Minister Boris Johnson to shut down all non-essential businesses. Wherever possible, I tried to adhere to prevailing conditions and government-mandated restrictions. But when necessary, I granted myself the license to tell my story without the crushing weight of the pandemic. I chose Switzerland as the primary setting for The Cellist because life there proceeded largely as normal until November 2020. That said, a private concert and reception at the Kunsthaus Zürich, even for a cause as worthy as democracy, likely could not have taken place in mid-October. I offer my profound apologies to the renowned Janine Jansen for the unflattering comparison to Anna Rolfe. Ms. Jansen is rightly regarded as one of her generation’s finest violinists, and Anna, of course, exists only in my imagination. She was introduced in the second Gabriel Allon novel, The English Assassin, along with Christopher Keller. Martin Landesmann, my committed if deeply flawed Swiss financier, made his debut in The Rembrandt Affair. The story of Gabriel’s blood-soaked duel with the Russian arms dealer Ivan Kharkov is told in Moscow Rules and its sequel, The Defector. Devotees of F. Scott Fitzgerald undoubtedly spotted the luminous line from The Great Gatsby that appears in chapter 32 of The Cellist. For the record, I am well aware that the headquarters of Israel’s secret intelligence service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. There is no safe house in the historic moshav of Nahalal—at least not one that I am aware of—and Gabriel and his family do not live on Narkiss Street in West Jerusalem. Occasionally, however, they can be spotted at Focaccia on Rabbi Akiva Street, one of my favorite restaurants in Jerusalem.
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Daniel Silva (The Cellist (Gabriel Allon, #21))
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Boris Johnson spoke to the nation,’ Horton writes. ‘He said of Covid-19, “We didn’t fully understand its effects.” His plaintive excuse will likely become the core defence of his government in the subsequent public inquiry into why the UK failed so spectacularly to protect its citizens. It is a defence that can and must be refuted.
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Jonathan Calvert (Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus)
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The actual antecedents of contemporary populist politicians like Trump are to be found not in interwar Central European totalitarian states but in state and local politics, particularly urban politics. In Europe, pro-Brexit Boris Johnson was the mayor of London before becoming prime minister, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini was on the city council of Milan from 1993 to 2012.
In the United States, the shift from post-1945 democratic pluralism to technocratic neoliberalism was fostered from the 1960s onward by an alliance of the white overclass with African Americans and other racial minority groups. The result was a backlash by white working-class voters, not only against nonwhites who were seen as competitors for jobs and housing, but also against the alien cultural liberalism of white “gentry liberals.” The backlash in the North was particularly intense among “white ethnics”—first-, second-, and third-generation white immigrants like Irish, German, Italian, and Polish Americans, many of them Catholic. The disproportionately working-class white ethnics now found themselves defined as bigots by the same white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites who until recently had imposed quotas on Jews and Catholics in their Ivy League universities, but who were now posing as the virtuous, enlightened champions of civil rights.
This toxic mix of black aspiration, white ethnic backlash, and WASP condescension provided a ripe habitat for demagogues, many of them old-school Democrats like Frank Rizzo, mayor of Philadelphia, Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles, and Mario Angelo Procaccino, failed mayoral candidate in New York. These populist big-city mayors or candidates in the second half of the twentieth century combined appeals to working-class grievances and resentments with folksy language and feuds with the metropolitan press, a pattern practiced, in different ways, by later New York City mayors Ed Koch, a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani, a Republican.
In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American. Traits which seem outlandish in a US president would not have seemed so if Trump had been elected mayor of New York. Donald Trump was not Der Führer. He was Da Mayor of America.
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Michael Lind (The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite)
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Я гнав на своєму сірому скакуні вздовж лінії сутички, а решта наших лежали під укриттям. Можливо, це була дурість, але я граю на високі ставки. Коли ти в бою, кожен вчинок відважний, кожна дія шляхетна".
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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June 2021 the papers were cackling over Boris Johnson’s much anticipated biography Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius, which had been announced with some fanfare in 2015 and slated for publication in 2016 to mark the four-hundred-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s death but which, five years later, had yet to materialize.
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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Proper rich people don’t encounter these rooms, these borders, these problems. For them the world is as it is when seen from space, without boundary, without limitation, full of fluid possibility and whispering wonder. Often the principles that need to be employed for the majority are already enjoyed by the elites: They support one another; they sell state assets to the businesses their friends own; when their banks collapse because of irresponsibility or misfortune, they bail their pals out. They know it’s the right thing to do; it’s how they treat their friends and family; they just don’t want it for the rest of us. I’m aware that now, due to my good fortune, I am a member of the 1 percent. That now I am a tourist in poverty, when on occasion I’ve found myself in cuffs or in cells or cowed by authority, I know I can afford lawyers, I know I am privileged now. I know too with each word I type I am building a bridge of words that leads me back to the poverty I’ve come from, that by decrying this inequality, I will have to relinquish the benefits that this system has given me. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t frighten me. Anyone who’s been poor and gets rich is stalked by guilt and fear. Guilt because you know it isn’t fair, that life hasn’t changed for everyone, and fear because you feel like a fraud, that one day there’ll be a knock on the door or a tap on the shoulder or a smack in the mouth and they’ll take it back. It’s not like I’m gonna pay voluntary tax to our corrupt government, as suggested by that honey-glazed chump Boris Johnson; donations aren’t the answer, especially not to that cartel of Etonian skanks. Systemic change on a global scale is what’s required, and because I know that is happening, that it is inevitable, that we are awakening, I will, when I know how, sever the gilded chains. “Oh, yeah, mate? When?” you could crow with legitimate suspicion. Well, I suppose, like every aspect of this project, we’ll work that out together.
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Russell Brand (Revolution)
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I think he would be very proud of the continuing legacy of Britain in those
places around the world, and particularly I think he would be amazed at
India, the world’s largest democracy - a stark contrast, of course, with other
less fortunate countries that haven’t had the benefit of British rule. If I can
say this on the record - why not? It’s true, it’s true.’ -
Boris Johnson of Winston Churchill, on whom he has just finished writing a book
‘I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.’
‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ - Winston Churchill
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Akala (Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire)
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He was the large protruding nail on which destiny snagged her coat.
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Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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En aquel momento muy pocos creían que el Brexit que acababa de ganar en un referéndum llevaría al Reino Unido a separarse de Europa; igualmente, la mayor parte de la gente no creía que Donald Trump pudiese llegar a la presidencia de Estados Unidos. Se creía que esos fenómenos populistas ocurrían solamente en las zonas periféricas como en la Hungría de Viktor Orbán, la Turquía de Erdoğan o la Venezuela de Maduro. Pero ahora sabemos que las ideas de Nigel Farage triunfaron en el Reino Unido, encarnaron en el primer ministro Boris Johnson y han llevado al Brexit. Hemos visto que un personaje tan nefasto como Trump llegó a presidir el país más poderoso de la Tierra. Y observamos que los populismos de derecha crecen como hongos y se fortalecen en muchos lugares de Europa.
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Roger Bartra (Regreso a la jaula: El fracaso de López Obrador (Spanish Edition))
Boris Johnson (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History)
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There was always trouble, and he always rose from the resulting miasma looking a lovable scamp: lovable, anyway, to that gratifyingly large sector of the populace to whom he'd always be a figure of fun: breathing a bit of the old jolly into politics, and where's the harm in that, eh? As for those who hated him, they were never going to change their minds, and since he was in a better position to fuck them up than they were him, they didn't give him sleepless nights.
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Mick Herron (Real Tigers)
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Boris Johnson is a rarity among educated people, his mouth is faster than his brain.
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Alexis Mantheakis
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Please help me out of this. My mother fakes being me on Phone. Greetings, Ozan Bülbül. Send someone to meet me at 3 Pm at düdüklü in 6 days, and clarify things, and getting me out of this. Im also known as "the OZ".
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Boris Johnson
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To a man like Roger Barlow, the whole world just seemed to be a complicated joke … everything was always up for grabs, capable of dispute; and religion, laws, principle, custom – these were nothing but sticks from the wayside to support our faltering steps.
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Boris Johnson
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A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny… where free institutions are indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate, the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.’ SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
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Peter Oborne (The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism)