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“... greatest follies. Nor do I refer only to the Conservative Party. I voted out of conviction for Neil Kinnock and believe that he will make a considerable prime minister: but it has dawned on a number of the more perceptive members of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy that by devising a Byzantine system of election, involving the whole rigmarole of the ...”

“... wisteria. These hardly weigh up against the loss of a parliamentary salary. Consider the case of Neil Hamilton, who was defeated by Martin Bell after 14 years as an MP. One of his crimes was to have lived it up in the Paris Ritz at Mohamed al-Fayed’s expense. He and his wife, Christine, stayed for six days instead of the expected two or three, ate six ...”

“... Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This wasn’t true, Kraus thinks: Jakobson taught at Harvard, which didn’t take girls until the mid-1970s. Acker ...”

“... of Michael Portillo. The other candidates are unknown and rather unknowable, though Iain Duncan-Smith, the spear-carrier of Thatcherism, is not what the Conservative Party now needs. There appears, to an outsider, little ideological coherence to the contest. Clarke, a genially tolerant figure and a strong Europhile, has some surprising supporters, including ...”

“... notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the ...”

“... voters baulked and the Tories won comfortably with a lead of over 7 per cent. But the minute Smith succeeded Kinnock, Labour shot into a lead which was consolidated beyond recovery by the effect of the forced exit from the ERM in September 1992. The Government had endlessly told the electorate that leaving the ERM would be a disaster and had even raised ...”

“... have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ‘social ownership’. By the time Benn contested the leadership in 1988, he was a spent force. Voted off the NEC in 1993, he could only ...”

“... recently represented: the City of London, big business, the Union, even Whitehall. To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, how did we end up in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – setting about the seemingly deliberate demolition of the United Kingdom and its economy? From a Tory perspective, things must have reached a ...”

“... It had proved impossible to find any of Dame Barbara’s novels in local bookshops or even W.H. Smith, though I was lent a copy of Lovers in Lisbon by Portuguese friends on condition that I cherished it. There were two novels in the package, A Nightingale Sang and The Disgraceful Duke, as well as a small pink booklet on the cover of which is a drawing of ...”

“... and policy-planning groups and has also effectively resumed the job he held under Neil Kinnock as Communications Director, though his centre of operations has now moved to the Party’s new media headquarters at Millbank – ‘my Millbank’, as he likes to call it. It has become a Westminster cliché, echoed privately by the Shadow ...”

“... exhibition, hoards and weapons: axes, spearheads, swords and shields, helmets and ring mail. The smith clearly took as much pride in his work as the carpenter. The Vale of York hoard, which dates from the 920s, contains silver coins, a Frankish liturgical cup, arm rings and what’s called ‘hack silver’. Sunhild Kleingärtner and Gareth Williams ...”

“... after twenty years’ sobriety, your disease will be two decades more terminal. ‘Rust,’ as Neil Young (the alcoholic’s favourite balladeer) puts it, ‘never sleeps.’ The belief that they are victims of an illness allows recovering alcoholics to forgive themselves for the awful things done in drink. Few, by the end of their drinking careers, have ...”

“... over a song from his posthumously released ‘demos’ album Love Is Overtaking Me. It’s as if Neil Young had made not just the lilting Harvest Moon and the frazzled Tonight’s the Night, but also Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ and Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians into the bargain. What can they possibly have in ...”

“... opening of The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army. There are speeches in the Great Court – Neil MacGregor as always the best, no one that I’ve ever heard ‘turning’ a speech as well as he does and giving it a flick at the finish. There’s also what is billed in the programme as a ‘Special Guest’. This turns out to be Gordon Brown, who makes a ...”

“... on an understanding of his character and the political environment of the time. Very few did. Neil Kinnock may be suffering a similar fate. Whatever the shortcomings of its policies, his party has lately been the victim of some crude misrepresentation and malicious attacks. The failure of his American tour and his ineffectiveness in the House of Commons ...”