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“... there a (fictional) man behind the moustache? Well, there is a director, who is also Branagh, and Michael Green, a thoughtful and inventive scriptwriter. They give shape and sense to a particular notion of Poirot. But it is Branagh’s acting that makes the notion work. I say this as a non-fan of his Shakespeare films (Hamlet, Henry V, Much Ado about ...”

“... diaries and Hilary Wainwright’s Labour: A Tale of Two Parties) and ‘Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson’. The first began, I imagine, simply as a critique of the Bennite Left and ended (famously) as a critique of Neil Kinnock. It argued that the political judgments and electoral sociology upon which the Bennites had based their strategies were ...”

“... philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has stuck to the Duke of Windsor himself, to say nothing of the Duchess. Sarah Bradford’s biography of George VI portrayed him as the ultimate sacrificial ...”

“... riots. In the adjournment debate on ‘Civil Disturbances’, MPs as far apart as Joan Lestor and Michael Heseltine agreed that the speeches had transcended party politics. Of course there were exceptions. No Tory MP joined Stuart Holland and John Fraser in their criticism of the Police in Brixton, and no Labour MP supported Winston Churchill’s call for an ...”

“... world of physicists was later to reach such a pinnacle. His slightly older contemporary William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) was even more precocious than Maxwell, matriculating at the University of Glasgow at the astonishing age of ten and becoming a professor there at a mere 22. Thompson’s scientific standing among ...”

“... managed to reveal quite so many things that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet Pincher believes he never threatened the security of the state – that would be the work of a traitor, which is the way he described Snowden in a recent television ...”

“... is as close as it is unappreciated.7 It is this connection which interests the historian E. P. Thompson and which informs his best-selling polemic ‘Protest and Survive’.8 Like all good polemics, Mr Thompson’s takes the form of a sermon on a text – in this case, a letter published in the Times of 30 January 1980 ...”

“... Peculiar alliances are struck over this dislike, most notably between Taylor himself and E.P. Thompson. The two men united in their pronouncements as to the emptiness of Carpenter’s ‘individualism’, the weedy, private-income vegetarianism that he embodied, the hopeless blend of mysticism and retreatism that took the place of politics. The now ...”

“... and Kegan Paul published The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, a Wagnerian epic in which history went to town in exuberant, zestful and flamboyant fashion. Understandably, the two volumes won immediate and widespread acclaim as a tour de force of entrepreneurial inspiration and editorial skill: ‘a study in ...”

“... canvas of the Cold War were already under way in the Balkans in the summer of 1944 when Frank Thompson was executed. Bulgaria was a member of the Axis and Frank, older brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, was on a mission in the country for Special Operations Executive: the idea was that anti-Nazi partisans should be ...”

“... 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 ... Young ...”

“... ever there was a politicians’ battle, then Goose Green was to be it.’ Brigadier Julian Thompson, the senior officer ashore at the time, found himself summoned to the satellite terminal at Ajax Bay. The headquarters at Northwood told the Brigadier exactly what to do. The command in Britain considered it essential that the landing force should engage ...”

“... formidable figures have recently announced their unshakable faith in nuclear armoury. Professor Michael Howard tells us in the columns of the Times that the peace of the world will be imperilled if we relinquish nuclear weapons. Field-Marshal Lord Carver, I hear, is writing a book preaching the same doctrine. These are authorities whom I much respect. It ...”

“... but there is a promising cohort of liberationists among the period’s other radicals: William Thompson, Francis Place, George Petrie, Thomas Spence, Robert Owen and Richard Carlile. In his day, Carlile was no less celebrated as a political agitator, and as a polemical atheist, than he was as a sexual reformer: some such mix of activities was the rule for ...”

“... perhaps Blake used the copper plate as a sketchpad, as Peter Ackroyd suggests in his biography. Michael Phillips’s replicas of the original plates testify to the artist’s industry and also to the devotion of modern Blakeans. The lay observer can hardly bear to contemplate the toil involved in all that neat, packed engraving, let alone in having to do ...”