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“... at Stonyhurst, better than it does Andrew himself, who was brought up by a private tutor at Marbot Hall. But what it describes is one half of the English experience Hildesheimer presents, the foil against which the other half – Andrew’s life – must be seen. More recent German Anglophiles have found that there is a price to pay for these attractive ...”

“... Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too Webby’. Socialist eggheads remained a source of exasperation into the late ...”

“... earlier in the day. Graham McCann proposes that this popular endorsement of Morecambe and Wise as de facto national comics is also a vindication of what were then the public service ideals of the BBC. As national broadcasting fragments under the narrowing commercial stresses of satellite and digital, and as political devolution threatens national news ...”

“... a low wall which abuts the court on the ‘hazard end’ – mimics the layout of a dining hall or long forgotten medieval street. In part because of the size and complexity of the court, real tennis was from the beginning an exclusive game, often associated with royalty. Two French kings died of tennis injuries. Anne Boleyn was watching a game of ...”

“... time, nothing much seemed to be happening, but then in January the lead counsel to the inquiry, David Barr KC, who has been plodding through the evidence since 2015, made a submission about the role of SDS’s senior management. He focused on a simple question: what was the justification, as understood at the outset, for the infiltration by undercover ...”

“... start which I somehow feel should be the climax of the show, but better for me as by the time we do get round this quite substantial exhibition I’m exhausted. As always with Rembrandt feel almost arraigned by the self-portraits and put on the spot. ‘And?’ he seems to be saying. ‘So?’ The self-disgust is there and the sadness, but in a very ...”

“... guerrilla footage of the real Boris Johnson jabbering on his cell phone and wobbling towards City Hall, as well as faked sequences of a clown with an unshorn flop of albino hair stunting around underpasses and concrete ramps. The Tebbit sound-bark has come back, to remind us how neatly bogus bicycle rhetoric chimes with agitation in the streets, with the ...”

“... so far rightwards that it isn’t really the same party any more. In that process of migration, David Blunkett was one of the key players. Blunkett is important not only because of how he behaved when in office – we’ll get to that in a moment – but also because of the journey he took to get there. A man who from 1980 to 1987 was the leader of the ...”

“... London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail. As a boy, wrote Sir Perry, he had wanted to be editor of the Times more than anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction ...”

“... compete with the badge on the players’ shirts; and to my mind at least, the game had nothing to do with money. This year, the championship was won in injury time at the end of the final game of the season with a goal by the Argentinian striker Sergio Aguero, whom City had bought for £38 million less than a year before, and even the children hugging their ...”

“... movement is concentrated now on handing him a defeat in this year’s midterm elections. Don’t do anything rash to jeopardise our victory – that is what the radio hosts say. (The Tea Party crowd with their anti-tax, anti-debt, anti-government views are regarded sympathetically by something between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of the voters: they know they ...”

“... Tony, on hearing which Cherie said that’s a lie, but being overheard herself had to deny she’d said any such thing, though the next day Tony more or less admitted that her denial wasn’t to be trusted either, before going on to pretend that he still admired Gordon too, and then pledging himself to the cause of peace in the Middle East – it was no ...”

“... the book’s ghostwriter to be anybody who already knew a lot about him. I told Jamie that I’d seen Assange at the Frontline Club the year before, when the first WikiLeaks stories emerged, and that he was really interesting but odd, maybe even a bit autistic. Jamie agreed, but said it was an amazing story. ‘He wants a kind of manifesto, a book that ...”

“... grail of the AI community – turns out to be a distraction. Machines that are capable of learning do not have to be capable of thinking the way we do. What they require are vast amounts of data, which they can filter at incredible speed searching for patterns on the basis of which they make inferences, and then for further ...”

“... The major contribution of the English theatre to last year’s Brecht centenary was Lee Hall’s dazzling version of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, presented by the Right Size, a touring company led by the comic actors Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. Their prologue goes some way to explaining why the Anglophone response to the Brechtfest was so muted ...”