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“... smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is brilliant, setting the scene for what is to be a bleak story, introducing some of the leading characters, and insinuating that the author was eyewitness to an intimate ...”

“... 1969 and the moment when real money, the paper kind that came with a few silver coins in a small brown envelope, disappeared. For ever. I had a casual labouring job, unloading containers and stacking trucks and vans in muddy sheds alongside the railway in Stratford. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, Stratford East: a wonderful bucolic address, backed up by a ...”

“... that before being sworn in he had himself anointed with cooking oil in the biblical manner of King David. Ashcroft chose Carl Esbeck, who had directed the Center for Law and Religious Freedom run by the conservative Virginia-based Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation ...”

“... a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by hedges and lines of trees and narrow lanes. Farmed fields, in other words. We perceive the countryside as if farmed fields were the default state, as if the two were synonymous. But why should this be true, when so much ...”

“... to European occupation have always been bound up with contemporary political reckonings. Dee Brown, an amateur historian from Arkansas, published his bestselling book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), during the Vietnam War. Brown depicted the Indigenous peoples of the continent as heroically resisting an imperial ...”

“... anti-terror legislation in Europe’. There was an ‘authoritarian streak’ in both Blair and Brown, who ‘ratcheted up coercion’ because of ‘their failure to make real economic improvements’. Economic growth, ‘heavily centred on the financial industry’, was ‘achieved at the price of ever-new presents to bankers and the super-rich’. As a ...”

“... been made clear, still less where the money will come from to pay for the £7 billion in tax cuts David Cameron airily promised in his speech to the Conservative Party Conference last October. When such pledges are discussed in the media, it is usually in terms of whether they are funded or unfunded – whether the numbers ‘add up’. Osborne’s Autumn ...”

“... this time stole the surname of a classmate – formed a two-tone band called the Executive with David Austin (who would become a lifelong collaborator) and Ridgeley’s brother Paul. Michael was lead vocalist but hadn’t yet found the right style: his attempts at a Jamaican accent fell flat. A fifth member, Andrew Leaver, directed homophobic slurs at James ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... of course highly topical. The publication of Aristocrats has more or less coincided with that of David Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, which follows some of the themes of his earlier book, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Tillyard’s modishly-titled contribution is an enormous account of four ...”

“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”

“... Police – Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were but two of the kind of thing he was after. David Low portrayed him as a funeral mute with thick crêpe on his hat. Even that little classic The Specialist was a cause of some anxiety at Putnam, and a sigh of relief went up when the Times Literary Supplement dubbed it ‘innocently Rabelaisian’. We may ...”

“... to offer their kind of political rationalism, being composed largely of stolidly unintellectual, brown-booted trade-union hacks. As the PLP itself became more varied after 1918, the paper’s attitude grew more nuanced, though it continued to lambast the emblematic representative of early labourism at its most mediocre and conservative, the former ...”

“... discredited Right. His advisers hated this, and some, like his US-based consultant, Mark Malloch Brown, thought his man was damaging himself needlessly by associating with politicians like Belaunde, who represented ‘all that was worst in the traditional political order’. But they missed the point. It was too late for the middle way and their man was not ...”

“... he made his way to the top and once he was chancellor he dominated the government more even than Brown did Blair’s. With the advent of war in 1914 he exploited his friendship with the Tory leader, Bonar Law, to suggest the need for a national government. Only when Law had agreed did he put it to the premier – Asquith had succeeded Campbell-Bannerman in ...”