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“... its humour less absorbing than before. Even that blend of the banal and the appalling, to which Michael Holroyd rightly drew attention, was not as compulsive as it had been. The past was claiming its own. Disillusion is in a sense completed by this biography: not, I hasten to say, the biographer’s fault, since he has made it as readable as Hamilton’s ...”

“... lost is peepie-creepie, which I think perfectly describes the sad, appealing, murderous voyeur in Michael Powell’s famous thriller, though the OED instead defines it as ‘a portable television camera used for close shots on location’. Television was a new phenomenon at that point, and computers were barely visible on the horizon. Yet a number of the ...”

“... East’ – was influenced by the secret support he secured from Britain’s ambassador, Sir Michael Wright, in exchange for a promise not to join the UAR. Only Arab sources are cited for this interesting claim: according to Aburish the relevant documents are not yet available at the Public Record Office. It is hard to believe that an Arab superstate ...”

“... is looser in style and the tone is now more personal, there is a lingering coolness. Like Michael Hofmann, Greenlaw has a fondness for paired, unexpected adjectives delivered in a clipped prose-like manner: ‘This privacy is teenage,/collective’; ‘The hill has its nightlife, amiable, averted’. Rather like the quasi-journalistic ethos of ...”

“... ascribed to a waning of creative power; it is no doubt connected with the attenuation of physical powers, above all the power of desire. Yet from the inside the same development may bear a quite different interpretation: as a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks. He goes on to discuss the classic example, Tolstoy, and his ...”

“... through river nymphs to abstractions such as Victory, Fortune, Fear and Rumour. They invoked these powers through a great variety of practices, including blood sacrifice, prayer, cursing, libation, oracular consultation and healing rituals. Their sacred world was so capacious that it happily welcomed new gods from elsewhere – a phenomenon discussed by Ralph ...”

“... in 1981 – it was a close-run thing, but it was also the closest he would ever get to the top. Michael Foot, the party leader, was facing the brute realities of the Falklands War and the defection of the so-called Gang of Four to the SDP. The Labour left wasn’t about to have power wrested from it. It was beginning to dribble away. The sense of nostalgia ...”

“... seat, urged Scotland to ‘Think Twice’, to reject both a Parliament and its minor tax-varying powers. However, the Union – now renegotiated – has found new defenders. In the 1992 and 1997 general elections, Labour, the SNP and the liberal Democrats formed a loose nationalist alliance against the Tory defenders of the status quo, a popular front ...”

“... of each other and some seem to differ little from political polemics, but with Anthony Kenny, Michael Dummett, Roger Ruston and Bernard Williams among the contributors there is much that is worth considering. All four of these philosophers reject the notion that it is meaningful to have the bomb without having the hypothetical intention to use it. The ...”

“... seven countries including Britain and Argentina have claims). The American and Soviet super-powers are parties to both arrangements. Among the many morals to be learned from the events of 1982 is the need for member-states of the United Nations to reinforce the Charter’s absolute prohibition on the use of force, as an instrument of change; as for the ...”

“... As the authorities sought to continue control of prostitutes, under the subterfuge of the powers to control infectious diseases provided by the Cantonments Acts, they found themselves fighting a desperate rearguard action. In 1897 the Onslow Commission supplied them with ammunition by showing that the VD rate had risen to some 44 per cent of British ...”

“... Chrestos – which may or may not be relevant). Stewart’s view of the early Church as exercising powers of censorship and control is anachronistic: as an illicit private society it was in no position to do so, however much it may have wished to – witness the extraordinary variety of Christian manuscripts, orthodox, apocryphal, Gnostic, found in the rubbish ...”

“... Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists had few friends in the newspapers. A bizarre exception was Michael Wharton, a satirical and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions ...”

“... A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other fields: Dana, the Irish Eurovision popstar, Michael Cashman, one-time star of EastEnders, as well as sportspersons of various kinds: a Finnish world champion rally driver, an Italian mountaineer, a Spanish Olympic yachting gold medallist. Indeed, probably because they’re elected by a system of PR, people ...”

“... of copies were printed and distributed to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the ...”