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“... Writing history is like W.C. Fields juggling,’ was how he put it. ‘It looks easy until you try to do it.’ In 1977, when this comment was first published, some younger readers may have asked themselves: W.C. Who? Typically, this was not a forced, would-be trendy allusion to current vogues of popular culture in the electronic media but an authentically personal image, implicitly framed in nostalgia ...”

“... old. I was proof that a kid like him could turn into a normal teenager: see, Jews are okay! Even Chris Lethem’s got one in his family! I felt I was a token of a world improved by mongrelisation. I was by that time enamoured of Arthur C. Clarke, whose Stapledonian socialism thrummed just under the surface of his glossy ...”

“... without being considered for deportation (as they should have been under existing policy). Charles Clarke was replaced as home secretary by John Reid, who described the Home Office as ‘not fit for purpose’. Non-citizens with criminal records found themselves facing deportation. Current prisoners without British citizenship were identified, and when their ...”

“... potential methods of reducing the cost of the criminal system found no political favour. Kenneth Clarke, who was lord chancellor at the time, sought to reduce the length of sentences for serious crimes; David Cameron publicly overruled him. So, despite representing less than half the legal aid budget, civil claims – which are usually claims individuals ...”

“... the Institute of Fiscal Studies that devised the poll tax; or that the policy editor of Newsnight, Chris Cook, used to be an adviser to David Willetts; or that Nick Robinson, shortly to replace James Naughtie on Today, was once president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Doubtless most of the time these men do a bang-up job, suspending their ...”

“... and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... genuine’. ‘I’ve never seen a turnabout like this,’ Luntz crowed as Davis and Kenneth Clarke were dismissed as ‘not charismatic’, ‘old-style’, ‘very boring’, ‘all I, I, I’. The next day Cameron was due to give his leadership pitch to the conference; DVDs and printed summaries of the Newsnight package were hurriedly distributed to ...”

“... and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a ...”

“... to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Gordon Brown as genial and forthright in his way as Kenneth Clarke had been last year in his. First sight of lightly-bearded Alistair Darling, who strikes me as if chosen from a thousand aspirants to be cast as Iago at Covent Garden: is it, I wonder, an advantage in political life to look quite so operatically ...”

“... Guild.’ Years after the original series aired, the most prominent male member of the cast, Chris Noth, was accused by several women of sexual assault (accusations he denies).At least in its early seasons, Sex and the City was a comedy in which four single, straight, middle-class white women riffed on urban relationships in groundbreakingly explicit ...”

“... on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of SF fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens (or time travel ...”

“... human sense of the loneliness of space which he found pre-eminently in the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke. And the film owes its lasting appeal to that common sensation: we find it almost impossible to believe that we are alone, and impossibly difficult to imagine how we might not be alone. Yet nothing in the spaces between the stars could be scarier than the ...”

“... legal system. At least that is one point of view. Another – shared by the police, by Kenneth Clarke and by Sir Hugh Annesley, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland – is that it is outmoded and favours the guilty, and should be scrapped because it is routinely exploited by clever criminals and terrorists. (Annesley has even suggested that refusal to ...”