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“... destroy them as a political force in the process. Up went tuition fees, and out went Nick Clegg. David Cameron was the salesman, Clegg was the punch-bag, but Osborne was the one pulling the strings. Whenever he became the focus of attention, as he did after his ‘omnishambles’ budget in 2012, his lack of presentational skills came close to being his ...”

“... Barnett mounts a vituperative attack on the CBCs, unearthing a priceless memo from David Cameron written in response to accusations that he lacked the common touch: ‘Please, operational grid, give me the right language.’ And he gives an acute analysis of the postwar transition from ‘the government of a whole society by a ...”

“... According​ to elevator legend, it all began with a stunt. In the summer of 1854, at the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York, an engineer called Elisha Graves Otis gave regular demonstrations of his new safety device. Otis had himself hoisted into the air on a platform secured on either side by guide-rails and – at a suitably dramatic height – cut the cable ...”

“... recognised, which, at most times in his life, he has taken great care to repress. One reward of David Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention.* His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early ...”

“... Actors don’t lodge in the culture as once they did,’ David Thomson writes in the entry on Heath Ledger in the latest edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film. ‘They are a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured ...”

“... of History’, retreats to the old cliché that the business of the historian is to deal in facts. David Starkey complains that the history syllabus in schools places far too little emphasis on facts, and far too much on critical thinking. Sharpe wants the best of both worlds, facts and critical thinking hand in hand. But a history that could answer the ...”

“... lay unconscious imitations of the Crucifixion, of ritual sacrifice, holy war and autos-da-fé. French history and literature were steeped in blood between 1789 and 1945, he says, because of an irrepressible longing for lost certitudes: the certitudes of faith and of pre-Haussmann Paris, with its comforting organic unity, its pleasing tangle of tiny ...”

“... life. None of the judges seems to have been able fully to grasp the force of an argument made by David Harris QC on behalf of Rosie: ‘John Locke’s assertion that "every man has a property in his own person. This no body has any right to but himself” . . . is difficult to apply in the case of conjoined twins.’ I have looked again at the photograph on ...”

“... The sight of the last editor of the Times leaving his job was disconcerting. Why was he going after only a year? Was it political disagreement? Or to do with overspending? Or with the style of the paper? Why had he not appealed to the ‘independent national directors’ introduced to arbitrate in such matters? There was no explanation. But, whatever was happening, the position of editor of the Times, as well as Mr Harold Evans personally, was taking a knock ...”

“... The​ National Portrait Gallery’s Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky (until 26 June) displays a small but rich body of works made between 1867 and 1914, focused on Russia’s writers, artists, actors, composers and patrons, most of whom will be familiar – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov ...”

“... Particle physics is at once the most elegant and brutish of sciences. Elegant because of its sweeping symmetries and exquisite mathematical structures. Brutish because the principal means of acquiring information about the subatomic realm is revving up tiny bits of matter to extraordinary energies and then smashing them together. Imagine trying to discern the hidden inner workings of a pocketwatch – carefully gauged springs and gears, all arranged just so – by hurling it at a wall and watching the detritus as it flies apart ...”

“... of Josef Albers shows bias. The exclusion of Mark di Suvero means the omission of the one artist (David Smith is something else) who has created a sculptural equivalent of Abstract Expressionism, the movement which forms the nucleus of the exhibition. The exclusion of Chuck Close, accompanied by the inclusion of three large works by Jonathan Borofsky, can ...”

“... to address about intense human dilemmas, demonstrate that he was not a Shavian but a Mametian. For David Mamet, drama poses questions the conscious mind cannot answer, questions whose complexity and depth render them insusceptible to rational examination. For Ferguson, Nora Helming’s escape from the Doll’s House is both psychologically implausible and ...”

“... than in the debates of 1980 and 1984, in both of which Ronald Reagan’s surrogate opponent was David Stockman, a young former radical who went on to head the Office of Management and Budget before resigning over the budget deficit in Reagan’s second term. Stockman had been employed by the independent candidate John Anderson, and played Anderson (with ...”

“... if rightly understood would naturally be forgiven. This was the alibi endorsed in January 2010 by David Margolis, the Justice Department official who reviewed the recommended censure of the ‘torture memos’ by the lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee and upgraded the evaluation of their actions from ‘professional misconduct’ to ‘poor judgment’. Like the ...”