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“... hard can it be?’ In his book The New Machiavelli, Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, describes his boss’s eagerness on becoming prime minister to undertake an immediate programme of reform. But the more he agitated for change, the less responsive the machinery of government proved to be. There was an empty space where Blair had believed ...”

“... which hung outside the Security Council, was covered over to stop it forming a backdrop when Colin Powell was making the case for the Iraq war – a bronze bust of Powell forms part of the installation. In front of it at the Whitechapel is a circular glass case/ conference table, surrounded by black leather chairs. Among the ...”

“... high street shoppers being shown another of Amaral’s colourised photographs, this time of Lewis Powell, one of the men who conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln, and who on the same night made a savage attempt on the life of his secretary of state, William H. Seward. The shoppers were asked when they thought it had been taken. ...”

“... the Brixton riots: at a lunch party in nearby Stockwell, the firmest of the true believers, Jane Powell, is maintaining that a legal amnesty should have been given to all those arrested in the street fighting. Her friends call her Saint Jane: she is a lawyer who works for a law centre, a hard-working Labour councillor, regularly insulted by her Haughey-like ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... now I have taken the view that my ‘Desert Island’ book, if I were asked, would have to be David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. First published in 1970, it has just re-appeared as A Biographical Dictionary of Film in a third edition that is revised and considerably enlarged. Despite its titles it is indeed a work of ...”

“... allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental education. Together with plays by John ...”

“... explain to people why it’s necessary’. All very confusing. Fortunately, the PM’s off to Camp David next week (on 31 January) to have matters straightened out for him by his superiors. He won’t have time to read Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War (NYU, $16.95), a collection of essays edited by John Collins and Ross Glover about ...”

“... as an occasion for otherwise elusive experience. It came to represent the modern in general, as David Welsh ably demonstrates in two immense chapters, one on utopian fantasy from the turn of the 20th century, the other on the inevitable ensuing sourness. In Anticipations (1902), H.G. Wells imagined the Metropolitan Railway’s ‘black and ...”

“... three Hollywood figures, a director (Barry Sullivan), an actress (Lana Turner) and a writer (Dick Powell), in that order. The first two refuse to take the call, the third takes it and tells Shields to drop dead. Next, still in the present, we see all three in the office of a movie producer (Walter Pidgeon), who is about to set up another call from Shields. He ...”

“... reduced in scale. In hindsight, the only figure who commands one’s unequivocal admiration is David Steel. Steel was shrewd enough to want the Four to found their own party rather than join the Liberals. He somehow jollied along the grandee Jenkins, made friends of Williams and Rodgers and, incredibly, even supported several years in harness with the ...”

“... before they had completed a breakthrough structure for Reliance Controls in Swindon, which Kenneth Powell describes as ‘neither a factory nor an office building nor a research station but a combination of all three’. The first of many ‘flexible sheds’ that Rogers has designed over the years, the Reliance Controls Electronics Factory owed much to the ...”

“... too close to it may in many cases be destructive. Circumstances must come in.’ In the 18th, David Hume believed that ‘parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle’, were ‘perhaps the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon’ that had yet appeared, and that ‘all general maxims in politics ought to be established with ...”

“... the politicians are no longer in control. In an email released at the Hutton Inquiry, Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s chief of staff, wrote to Alastair Campbell and David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, of an early draft of the September dossier on Iraq’s WMD programme: ‘I think it is worth ...”

“... our joining the Common Market. It is no coincidence that the best political styles belong to Enoch Powell, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn and Michael Foot, all men ‘committed to working on and defending the idea of the United Kingdom’. As it happens, Mr Powell himself contributes a piece on ‘The Language of Politics’, in ...”