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“... Baron’s ill-repute was such that, even if 450 new peers had been needed to give the Parliament Bill a majority, he would have been excluded from the list by royal command. These may be ranked as small imprudences, however, and when they are set beside Lord Randolph Churchill’s relationship with Lord Rothschild no decline in standards is discernible. If ...”

“... Conservative Party has now said it wants to repeal the Human Rights Act, and replace it with a new bill of rights that would better reflect the traditional freedoms the people of this island are presumed to care about. The Tory charter would reaffirm the primacy of individual freedom and empower the individual to resist overweening state power. However popular ...”

“... be impeded in many different ways. Cost is the most obvious. In Alice’s day, presentation of a bill was free, so even the poor had some access to justice. Today, if she is unable to afford to go to court, her theoretical right to have her case heard will be small comfort. And the high quality of the English legal system has endowed it with an exorbitant ...”

“... in the middle, and you may get what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your ...”

“... On Sunday 21 March the House of Representatives passed a healthcare bill that had been promoted for a year and brokered in many particulars by Barack Obama. This marked a victory for a substantial piece of social legislation, the first of its kind in more than three decades; and the result appears to have given the president and his party fresh confidence in their efforts at comprehensive reform ...”

“... there was. Oppenheimer yielded to the president and his generals, supporting the May-Johnson Bill to create an Atomic Energy Commission with much secrecy and military influence. Anxious to remain an insider, he stumbled into a disastrous interview with Truman. Noticing that the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ seemed strangely inarticulate, Truman asked ...”

“... he looked and sounded deeply sincere, far more so than the always eloquent – too eloquent – Bill Clinton. Nobody could fail to notice the up-front strategy: a role-reversal exercise that presented the Republicans as the party of blacks (Colin Powell), almost-feminists (an entire squad of assertive, dynamic women politicians) and ‘caring’, even ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”

“... their isolation. The president’s personal style had some of the same effect. ‘I’m not Bill Clinton,’ he said on the brink of declaring his candidacy. ‘I don’t need this [the adulation of crowds] … I don’t need anything.’ The conciliator, the community organiser, was also an isolato, withdrawing to the Treaty Room late at night to make ...”

“... could mean the end of the act. Not for the British, who will probably have some kind of beefed-up Bill of Rights for Clegg to boast about, but for the immigrants, asylum seekers and suspected terrorists whose humanity the act at least notices and occasionally protects. The ridiculously entitled Freedom Bill has already put ...”

“... owner of arguably the best-known entirely plain face in the world, the richest man on the planet: Bill Gates III. According to Cringely, top-level computer jocks are always, without exception, either hippies or nerds; the lank-haired, anal-retentive, oversized-glasses-wearing, non-fantastically-good-at-teeth-brushing Gates is the apotheosis of the nerd ...”

“... pressure as the size of ambitious work expanded after World War Two – from the vast canvases of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and others to the serial objects of Minimalists like Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and on to the site-specific and ‘post-medium’ installations of subsequent artists from James Turrell to Olafur Eliasson. To hold ...”

“... Constitution draws a line between the public and private spheres, with its First Amendment in the Bill of Rights specifically guaranteeing liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state. Such provisions are held partially to explain the peculiarly non-ideological tenor of American politics. From the outset, moreover, wannabe ‘Americans’ had ...”

“... new generation of readers, it was felt, did not have much time to think, much less read. Michael Jackson’s antics are now accorded front-page prominence; the books page has been replaced by full-colour spreads on fashion and celebrity lifestyles. Other newspapers, struggling to hold their own against the visual media, have imitated the Times’s upmarket ...”

“... tried to calm things down. A fair analogy may come from the 1850s, when the party of Jefferson and Jackson embraced slavery as their vote-getter, while the new Republicans, descendants of the Federalist Party of Adams and Washington, took their stand on anti-slavery and free labour. ‘I remember once being much amused,’ Lincoln wrote in a letter of 1859, at ...”