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“... famous libel action brought against the Spectator by Aneurin Bevan, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, Morgan Phillips, Secretary of the Labour Party, and Richard Crossman, a member of the Party’s National Executive. They had gone as official delegates to a congress of the Italian Socialist Party in Venice, and the Spectator had said that they ‘puzzled the ...”

“... football-mad cabinet ministers from taking up freebies at the Finals, the merchant bank Deutsch Morgan Grenfell has admitted to having 1600 seats already booked. (At England’s Euro 96 semi-final against Germany, an astonishing 14,000 people in the stadium were on corporate entertaining packages.) Of the ten venues, now commemorated on postage stamps, the ...”

“... imagines the early American legislators blinking in astonished awe as Congress gets Washington’s bill and ‘coughs up $100,000’ for expenses. All the lesser characters echo his obsession. John Adams, the first vice-president, thought his salary (a quarter of the president’s) ‘a sort of "curiosity"’; it has not been recorded, Vidal writes, whether ...”

“... But the pair started to get on his nerves, and he wrote them snippy notes about the gas bill, the cost of laundry and other domestic problems. ‘I told you one time since that I found it very disagreeable to come downstairs or into the house in the morning and find the light burning in the front hall.’ In 1909 Stein and Toklas started looking for ...”

“... Will Be My Undoing, an essay collection with an allusion to intersectionality in its subtitle, Morgan Jerkins argues that skin colour and hair type contribute to a hierarchical system within the black community. Vance is the lone open conservative in this group. US Millennials lean further left than their baby boomer parents: according to one recent ...”

“... is the work of a real thinker,’ and the social links between the two men (Augustus De Morgan, for example) seem to be thought of as mitigations, but they can only be the opposite. Babbage did not even try to meet Boole before 1862. A close involvement with the hardware of his machines was far from uncongenial to Babbage: a well-to-do ...”

“... first novel, Cup of Gold (1929, based on the adventures of the Elizabethan buccaneer, Henry Morgan) was an acknowledged homage to James Branch Cabell’s florid historical romances. In 1929 Steinbeck was introduced to Hemingway’s work by his future wife, Carol Henning, who gave him a copy of ‘The Killers’. It was to be as formative as Malory and ...”

“... many passengers from the Ealing area would use Crossrail in preference to the Underground. A bill was submitted to Parliament in 1991, and reluctantly thrown out, because, as in the 1970s, there was a recession and so no available funds. In 2001, Cross London Rail Links, a company set up by the newly formed Transport for London and the Strategic Rail ...”

“... non-departmental intelligence organisation’.Fleming delivered the report to William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a much decorated First World War veteran who had been lobbying Roosevelt to establish an American spy agency separate from the Navy, War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of Service of ...”

“... than backbench MPs, who can at least hope to leave their mark by sponsoring a private member’s bill, select committee membership, tenacious single-issue campaigning, or the odd rebellion in the division lobbies. Parliamentary under-secretaries get their mouths stuffed with gold, or at least with an extra £27,000 a year – as Mullin is reminded by the ...”

“... dead his 12-year-old sister, Majella. Like Andy, Michael was worried that the government’s new bill would prevent him from discovering exactly what had happened and bringing those responsible to justice. ‘Many might think we would be on opposite sides of this debate,’ Michael, Andy and Martha wrote in an open letter to Rishi Sunak later in 2022. ‘But ...”

“... what the textbooks regarded as a pillar of modern British statehood just as significant as the Bill of Rights (which William and Mary had accepted before they replaced James II): the Act of Union of 1707. I seem to recall that in the summer of 1974 we went to the Lake District. Strangely, though, when I left home for university at the end of the ...”

“... constitution. Drafting such a document would not merely allow the Government to entrench the Bill of Rights but require it to think through the answers to such questions as whether it is or is not in favour of the hereditary principle (for the moment New Labour has decided in favour of a ‘partially pregnant’ view on this), whether Britain is to be a ...”

“... Miliband, to commit to a milder form of austerity. Its whipped abstention on the Tories’ welfare bill shortly after its election defeat was emblematic of its lost bearings. In a field of leadership candidates remarkable only for its lack of distinction, Corbyn’s candidacy reminded the party what it had been missing: socialist principle. Since Corbyn’s ...”

“... 1990s and early 2000s were chumps, suckered by the Chinese. The more sophisticated version is that Bill Clinton’s team were too committed to the kind of modernisation theory Frances Fukuyama spun in his ‘end of history’ essay in 1989. They believed the liberal story that as China’s economy matured it would inevitably develop a need for the rule of law ...”