Search Results

“... a seat on Lambeth Council. I had worked for two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States ...”

“... Confidential Inquiry under the provisions of the National Health Service Act 1977, chaired by Michael Redfern QC. Its procedure, the Secretary of State determined, would be inquisitorial. Its terms of reference were, in essence, to find out what had happened at Alder Hey. Although Redfern’s Report, which was published in January, says that its main ...”

“... surely views his period as leader of al-Qaida with satisfaction. In Decoding al-Qaida’s Strategy Michael Ryan draws a useful distinction between the drawn-out or ‘deep’ battle of ideas and the ‘close’ battle of combat. The recent al-Qaida advances can be seen as close-battle victories of relatively little importance, but al-Qaida and the West are ...”

“... huge amounts of aid to the poor and a sophisticated advertising campaign that presented him as a Michael Bloomberg figure, a billionaire businessman who knew how to get things done, Thaksin’s party won the election by one of the largest margins in the country’s history. In office, he fulfilled some of his promises to the rural poor, who are concentrated ...”

“... Every year on 8 May, a young woman dressed in armour and carrying a white banner rides in procession through the streets of Orléans in north-central France. Dignitaries of Church and State join in commemorating an event and a life. The event is the French relief of the city, after months of siege by the English, in 1429; the life is that of Joan of Arc, a 17-year-old girl from Lorraine told by heavenly voices to go ‘into France’ and to rescue Orléans ...”

“... history. A similar model or map of culture is implicit in the work of historians in other fields: Michael Baxandall, for example, has explored the possible relation between cultural practices as different as painting, gauging barrels, and calligraphy, and Roger Chartier is concerned, like Greenblatt, with both practices and representations, and above all with ...”

“... Two people I knew have died: Maurice Berger, an art critic, curator and civil rights activist; and Michael Sorkin, the radical architect and critic. A friend at the Whitney told me of a staff member in his late forties, a father of two, who had died of the virus.The pain of social distancing and isolation isn’t negligible, but neither is it lethal, and in ...”

“... politics revolves is the Tories’ consolidation of the entire right-wing voting bloc under their banner, having effectively absorbed the vast majority of those who used to vote for Ukip or the Brexit Party. The unwitting father of this new Conservatism is David Cameron, though it’s very different from the vaguely socially liberal austerity state he ...”

“... and fairies, dances and processions. The Tate show includes in the last room a sculpture by Michael Wilkinson; made from scores of unspooling audiotapes it remembers the Taliban’s furious campaign against recorded music – a more recent instance of puritan fervour against private pleasures. Concepts of denial, both positive and negative, shadow the ...”

“... anti-apartheid and union standards, as well as a Momentum branch flag and a ‘Women for Corbyn’ banner. The crowd was largely young and white, but there was an older generation too – veterans of the struggle. Behind me a young man who had come with his mother dipped into a Waitrose bag and – perhaps eager to pre-empt the charge of champagne socialism ...”

“... good one – about 40,000 pounds more a year.’ The Langhornes were a loyal clan (Nancy’s son Michael Astor called his memoirs Tribal Feeling), so it’s not surprising that Nancy was always giving money to her poorer sisters and buying them houses, nor that she financed her eldest child throughout his life. Bobbie was chucked out of the Army for being ...”

“... of ambition that coursed through Scargill’s veins. To my mind Scargill’s Scottish counterpart, Michael McGahey – a lifelong Communist and the leader of the Left until Scargill overtook him – was the more impressive figure, and this despite his unwavering support for the party line throughout the Stalin period and beyond. McGahey was humane, often ...”

“... down as chairman of BSkyB. According to some people, like the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, the Sun’s former editor Kelvin MacKenzie and its current associate editor Trevor Kavanagh, one of the unfortunate victims of the phone-hacking scandal is News International itself. The company is being pilloried for practices that were ...”

“... Lord Liverpool’s repressions after Peterloo. The paper in time-honoured tradition carried the banner: PROSECUTED BY HER MAJESTY’S ATTORNEY-GENERAL. The jury found against Bradlaugh, but within three months the government passed the Newspapers, Printers and Reading Rooms Repeal Act 1869, which repealed the 1819 Act, and eight more statutes that fettered ...”

“... Westland, the Sun naturally backed her, and so when Patrick Mayhew, the Solicitor-General, told Michael Heseltine that his account of the rival bids might contain ‘material inaccuracies’, this confidential legal advice was immediately leaked to the Sun, whose sensitive and nuanced front-page account of the discussion was a ...”