Search Results

“... the POUM (roughly translatable as ‘The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification’). He was six foot two. If he’d been five foot eight the bullet would have gone through his head. If that had happened, what would the world think of him now?We wouldn’t have the word ‘Orwellian’ in the OED’s ...”

“... Policy Studies. These two books, by contrast, deal almost exclusively with Strachey’s politics. Michael Newman writes only briefly about Strachey’s private life, though he does reveal that young Charles Strachey, born at the height of his father’s revolutionary fervour, was promptly put down for Eton. Noel Thompson calls his book ‘an intellectual ...”

“... Iran. These missiles, said the prosecution, never existed. The four men, three arms-dealers called Michael Aspin, Eric Matson and John Taylor and a Lloyds underwriter called William Harper, were tried at the Old Bailey in early 1988. Aspin, Harper and Matson were found guilty and sent to prison – Aspin is still inside. Taylor was acquitted. Aspin, who was ...”

“... of that earth house I inheritedA stack of singular, cold memory-weightsTo load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.Where ‘Act of Union’ labours to deliver its sexual-political analogy, this douzain has a light abruptness. In ‘Squarings’ Heaney is happy to settle for approximations (‘maybe’, ‘dampish’) and gestural incompleteness ...”

“... campaign in 1945, and the abuse he received for it, even from young protégés like his beloved Michael Foot, was unnerving. His wartime colleague Clement Attlee called him ‘the man in public life who is most widely distrusted by decent men of all parties’. Beaverbrook’s career as a politician was over. With Labour in power, he had lost all his ...”

“... in The Forbidden Territory, as in most Wheatley novels: gunfights, grenades, fire; pursuits on foot, by wagon, by automobile and by plane; disguise, deception, sex. (At this early stage Wheatley’s allusions to sexual pleasure, especially his emphasis on the idea that women can enjoy sex, seemed unusually frank and modern; later on changing sexual mores ...”

“... Hitler and appeasement. Ever since 1940 and Churchill’s triumph, those whom Taylor’s friend Michael Foot had helped characterise as the Guilty Men had stood convicted for their folly at Munich; and ever since the Nuremberg trials, the far greater guilt of Hitler in planning the war had been generally presumed. Today this conventional wisdom looks ...”

“... journalist could wish. The fact remains that he was a wrecker. He helped to wreck Hitler, in what Michael Foot calls his ‘finest hour’, but he broke a lot of more deserving human beings as well. His potty campaigns wasted the nation’s time; his irruptions into politics unnerved politicians and put them off their already shaky stroke. The effect of ...”

“... Delhi in memory of Indira Gandhi. A little group of us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ...”

“... dissociating himself from the unilateral disarmament advocated by his close allies, including Michael Foot, Ian Mikardo and Crossman. Bevan believed that possession of the Bomb would be necessary for the protection of a postcolonial, democratic socialist non-aligned bloc. ‘Without its own nuclear deterrent,’ Thomas-Symonds ...”

“... an elaborate trap. Using actors pretending to be businessmen, the programme-makers approached Sir Michael Grylls, long-standing Tory MP for North-West Surrey, and introduced themselves as agents for a firm which wanted to smuggle art treasures out of Russia. As a cover for their enterprise, they explained, they wanted to buy a government agency, preferably ...”

“... transport frontbenchers in the Commons, up-and-coming young hopefuls called Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, welcomed the transfer, and specifically stated that this would enable the Council, if it felt like it, to hold transport fares down with a subsidy from the rates. Labour won back the GLC in 1973, but lost it to the Tories in 1977, when the new ...”

“... mean many things: that someone’s father, perennially out of work for ‘kicking with the wrong foot’, has managed to find a job; that the pop group Mud has gone to number one with ‘Oh Boy’; or, more likely, that there’s been a murder, a beating, a car bomb, a riot, a high-profile trial. ‘A booby-trap bomb that was intended for a British army ...”

“... without volition, and something very odd had happened with the rhythms. I had begun with a four-foot line, but it had changed abruptly into a pair of one-foot lines, then into a couplet with a three-foot beat. How had that happened! I had never seen or heard anything like it before. But ...”

“... Turn and turn about, it is the throne that moves and not the king. Five minutes I remained at the foot of the coffin, until I understood how unequivocal was the stillness and the silence. And I the only person in the room. I moved round to the side and touched his hand: toneless clean chilled meat. Another minute gazing on the face (some kind of plastic ...”