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“... at all. The vision quickly faded. Gorbachev demanded an end to SDI testing, Reagan would not grant it, and the opportunity was lost. Nor is it clear, even if they had agreed, that the two leaders could have sold the idea of abolition to their own and allied governments – Mrs Thatcher was particularly scathing. But as Jonathan Schell points out in The ...”

“... to the understanding of diabetes, he turns naturally to the life and contribution of Dr Frederick Grant Banting, who enrolled as a medical student in 1912 in one of North America’s largest medical schools – in the University of Toronto on the shores of Lake Ontario. Bliss says he was a tall and handsome young man who spent much of his spare time with his ...”

“... will raise nowhere near enough to undo the damage done by George Osborne’s cuts to the central grant, to be continued by Rishi Sunak. Notoriously, too, the more red-blooded Tories are prepared to let declining cities and regions go on declining. In 1981, Hoppit reminds us, the Thatcher government privately considered allowing Liverpool to wither, rather ...”

“... so moveable, that one can pin it down no more closely than by calling it ‘anti-establishment’. Michael Frayn may have excoriated that phrase – in his brief, brilliant introduction to the published text, Beyond the Fringe, in 1963 – as denoting ‘a spacious vacancy of thought’, but really, I don’t see how we can do any better. Any real ...”

“... rather than economics the matrix of social facts’. Both sociologists and theologians grant religion priority; it is just that the latter believe in it while the former do not. Sociology rejects eternal verities, yet what else is involved in the positivist conception of science? Transcendence is discredited, yet the idea of the social or cultural ...”

“... the former screenwriter Dori Carter’s potboiler Beautiful Wasps Having Sex, to studies such as Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.) Hollywood is captive to its own mythological origins. Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own sees it as the Jewish invention of a ‘shadow America’, an idealised vision of ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... to the newspapers attacked the influx of Jews, others also came to their defence, most notably Michael Davitt, the leader of the Land League. ‘The Jews have never to my knowledge done any injury to Ireland,’ he wrote in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal in 1893. ‘Like our own race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever ...”

“... has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in ...”

“... assumptions of their times. Sayers adds social and cultural snobbery to a conservative feminism; Michael Innes ties a display of interest in neoclassical art, literature and architecture to one in dreams, nightmare and the grotesque; Margery Allingham’s deep love of a semi-fictional and fast disappearing way of life in rural Suffolk and Essex is ...”

“... veto an honour for Edward Heath or Harold Macmillan than Tory dons would veto Harold Wilson. Even Michael Foot might have slipped through as a representative of the old order, a Thirties-ish, literary champion of the supremacy of Parliament, who caused offence mainly by mistaking the Cenotaph for the Aldermaston March. But Tony Benn of Westminster School and ...”

“... motion to be made standing between him and his taking of the oath.’ The leader of the House, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, rose to object. The speaker silenced him, reminding him that Hicks-Beach had himself not yet taken the oath. And that was the end of it. What is so remarkable is that Bradlaugh took the oath, which is precisely what he had sought not to do at ...”

“... The foundation is controversial, but continues to receive government subsidies, including a grant of €83,000 in 2012 to digitise its archive. It is comfortable making interventions in the public arena: recently it sued the sculptor Eugenio Merino for his work Always Franco, which featured a lifesize model of Franco standing in a Coca-Cola-style ...”

“... conditions; and to invoke a right is to suppose that there’s a plausible authority which can grant or affirm the right. There is no doubt that public feelings on the matter run high (at the time he was writing, in the late 1970s, very high), and these have to be acknowledged. But abortion is not a public act; even if it offends, it does not do so in the ...”

“... As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer ...”