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“... of its inhabitants was proven, in the words of James I’s attorney-general for Ireland, Sir John Davies, by their stubborn and perverse refusal to ‘plant any gardens or orchards, enclose or improve their lands, [or] live together in settled villages or towns’. The Irish rebels, according to Davies, were ‘wild and ...”

“... follow the lives and the 4000-mile migrations of seals southwards from Greenland, and Brian Davies, founder twenty years ago of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, tells of his success in 1983 in persuading the EEC Governments to ban the import of baby seal products. By 1987 he had procured a similar ban in Canada. ...”

“... things apply to Johnson, but a Venn diagram of these various characteristics would also include Michael Gove, Douglas Carswell, Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The result of these disparate characteristics is a comfortable familiarity with the myths and rituals of the British state, but a blasé indifference to the impact of policy. As Ian Jack pointed ...”

“... was boredom. Most people were interesting first time round. ‘Wednesday 9 July 1941: Lunched with Michael Foot, whom I liked very much. He hated and hates Chamberlain even more than I. His views, though a trifle too leftist, are sound.’ But they did not turn out to be permanently palatable. ‘Friday 3 October 1952: After dinner we watched a political ...”

“... treated like exotic gadgets to be operated with the help of instruction manuals. The shadow of Michael Gove, who as secretary of state for education between 2010 and 2014 insisted that children have traditional grammar drummed into them, still falls heavily on English schools. ‘Dear Gavin Williamson, could you tell parents what a fronted adverbial ...”

“... coalition’, ‘citizens of nowhere’) has been flung about like confetti. Some characters (Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt) have kept reappearing in different costumes; others (Gavin Williamson) played cameos which, in retrospect, seem scarcely real.One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according ...”

“... since she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ‘invaluable help, talent and patience’. You certainly don’t hear the Cherie described by Michael Levy, ‘every bit ...”

“... to be both uncommitted and watchfully involved could be more easily gratified. Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the daughter of the rakish artist and novelist George du Maurier, was married to a handsome and respectable lawyer; she was delicately beautiful, vivacious and unavailable. Still more enticingly, she had a batch of boisterous sons: George, Jack and ...”

“... world of fandom they opened up. A whole gallery of male heroes was assembled from decades past: Michael Caine, George Best, Keith Moon, Steve McQueen. Some of them I’d barely heard of and some were dead (or very nearly), but I was left in no doubt that a proper lad would be a fan of these geezers. Undoubtedly Loaded – along with ...”

“... word, come to think of it, sprang unbidden to the lips about half-way through the first act of Michael Hastings’s play Tom and Viv, now showing at the Royal Court. The play purports to be an account of T. S. Eliot’s first marriage, to Vivien Haigh-Wood, and I had been pretty well put off it by Peter Redgrove’s letter to the TLS: ‘if Eliot’s ...”

“... Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah. Jackson is said to have become a Muslim (which is sure to please his critics on Good Morning America), but evidence would suggest he has yet to get the hang of Islamic custom ...”

“... most. This may beg a lot more questions, but except to critics it is clear enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then occur; theorists of rhetoric can tell us how the effect is achieved; but the truth of the ...”

“... just behave with politeness – for the rest – she’s had it.’ In his biography of Williams, Michael Freedland gives a fuller account of this incident. He explains the basis of the sketch – two spies complaining about the uselessness of their technical gadgetry – and quotes Fenella Fielding: ‘We both had death pills. I would die first leaving him ...”

“... inside a Department – as in the case of what came to me from Clive Ponting. A careful look at Michael Heseltine’s lengthy broadcast evidence shows what exactly was taking place in the Whitehall stratosphere during the month in which Hilda Murrell was murdered. On 6 March Denzil Davies wrote to the Prime ...”

“... at the world from within double-glazed, centrally-heated rooms permeates many of these novels. Davies’s sketch of a character in The Element of Water could stand as a warning to all modern narrators: ‘Quantz, trained in the Canaris school of Intelligence but long returned to the Navy, couldn’t quite slough his habit of cynical observation.’ The ...”