Search Results

“... and its aftermath: Ian Gilmour, then the proprietor of the Spectator; Brian Inglis, its editor; Michael Foot, Bevan’s biographer; and Iain Adamson, the biographer of Gilbert Beyfus QC, who appeared for the politicians. Having argued the case again, with the benefit of new information, Mr Hooper concludes: ‘the plaintiffs’ case was an untrue ...”

“... politicians are turned into actors. They have got to choose an image, and then ‘project’ it. Michael Foot insisted on looking like what he is – ‘the corduroy, the wool tie, the academic’s white hair’ – and was duly run off the court by ‘the warrior queen ... her hair lacquered into Britannia’s golden helmet’. In modern times, York ...”

“... skating companion, even the chance to get into practice so as to do 18 miles on skates and four on foot in a short day. The boast from 1940 brings home how much I have in common with A.J.P.T. But that remark is hardly justified. He is a master of words, and a masterly combiner of evasiveness and paradox. Modern political history gives full scope for both, and ...”

“... it were able to tell us why some people don’t acquire narcissistic personality disorders. Kind Michael Foot, the only living politician to escape Abse’s criticisms, has said – the quote is on the dust-jacket – that Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice is ‘an extremely important political book’; and that no doubt is how Mr Abse would like his ...”

“... and nobs that he owned newspapers to make political propaganda. The life which Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie have written begins with a piece of elegant writing, like a dream sequence. It is an unpublished piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who would stamp his ...”

“... government would have handled the Falklands crisis with greater skill and to greater effect. Michael Foot speaks in the tones of Churchill in the Second World War and of Lloyd George in the First. It is fair to say that these two statesmen have often been numbered among Michael’s heroes. Still, I never expected ...”

“... In my dealings with him, however, I never found him the ‘semi-housetrained polecat’ that Michael Foot once called him. Back in 1980-81, when he was a junior minister at the Department of Industry and I was covering the mysteries of the Common Market for the Financial Times, I found him an agreeable character with a wry and self-deprecating sense ...”

“... that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation – not in the minority and ...”

“... helicopter company, discerning, as he does so, a campaign to discredit her Secretary for Defence, Michael Heseltine, who subsequently resigned. He claims, moreover, that she again misled the Commons over the American use of British bases to bomb Libya, and he sees her influence behind the police raids on BBC premises in Glasgow in the wake of the uproar over ...”

“... come to account for the dégringolade of modern British politics both Tony Benn and Paul Foot will find a place: Benn as actor, Foot as an observer. The two have much in common: both were born into very similar families; both see their lives as a continuing re-education, a casting aside of cultural baggage packed ...”

“... he never ceased to milk his memory for flagrantly sentimental recollections. For the 1964 Election Michael Foot wrote a Bevanite hagiography of Wilson, which he quickly expunged from his own Who’s Who entry (the opposite of the Kinnock technique) when Wilson’s Government, despite the presence in high office of Crossman and Barbara Castle, proved a ...”

“... Local government is to be made more independent of the block grants of Whitehall. (Paradoxically, Michael Heseltine is already achieving this result in spite of himself by his punitive use of the grant system, which is forcing some councils to raise almost all their own revenue.) The ‘embarrassingly radical proposals’ of the Layfield Committee are ...”

“... it first, and most convincingly. Exactly four years ago, when the aggregate of polling data gave Michael Dukakis a 17 point lead, Professor Roy Fair of Yale came up with a political/electoral ‘model’ that predicted a Bush victory with 52.2 per cent of the votes cast. In the event, Bush look 53.8 per cent, which was enough for an Electoral College ...”

“... actually had to say. No one who wanted peace would have behaved as Mrs Thatcher did. That is why Michael Foot was temporarily out of his mind, in an excess of misplaced chivalry, to tell the Commons on Monday, 14 June, after 10 o’clock in the evening: ‘I can well understand the anxieties and pressures that must have been upon her during these ...”

“... was an unruly and fissiparous coalition, with an extraordinary propensity to shoot itself in the foot, when Aneurin Bevan was still an unknown backbencher and Gaitskell a university lecturer. As the latest instalment of Ben Pimlott’s magisterial edition of Hugh Dalton’s diaries reminds us, the current leadership’s dismay at the vagaries of the ‘loony ...”