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“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... rather than a newspaperman. In his introduction to the new edition of A Child of the Century, David Denby compares him with Arthur Sullivan, who wanted to be the English Schumann and wrote many now forgotten symphonic works, while everyone remembers Patience and HMS Pinafore. Hecht didn’t become a great novelist or playwright, but he found that he ...”

“... the Communist Party as a career move: ‘You will meet big people.’ By the end of that year, David Platt, the Daily Worker’s movie reviewer (a witness frequently summoned by Hoberman for counterpoint), announced that ‘never before in the history of the screen have there been so many forward-looking people in positions of responsibility as in ...”

“... in Bangkok when the American actor Fred Forrest would spend the evenings laboriously changing David Hare’s dialogue for Saigon, Year of the Cat. When I asked him why, he said: ‘Can you imagine Marlon sticking to the text?’ Forrest had been in Apocalypse Now, and had watched Brando climbing palm trees in the Philippines and throwing coconuts at ...”

“... communities’. We should have expected all this. ‘The cranks and critics flourish,’ said Joan Robinson ten years ago (in a lecture to the American Economics Association, reprinted in Contributions to Modern Economics), ‘because the orthodox economists have neglected the great problems that everyone else feels to be urgent and menacing.’ Since ...”

“... to toss a gigantic potato crêpe, which remained lodged on the studio rafters, or of a Heath Robinson olive-stuffing machine that botches the job 50 per cent of the time, producing variants of stuffed olives ‘to the limits of solid geometry’. Levy, an academic manqué, is always erudite, particularly on non-European cuisines, and often deeply ...”

“... time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated the Romantic poets’ minds on their own social isolation, on the necessary dissidence of the poet’s task and the short time reserved for its performance. Chatterton ...”

“... it was mended with the Fresh Start Agreement. The then first and deputy first ministers, Peter Robinson and McGuinness, issued a joint statement signalling ‘our resolve to engender the sea change so longed for by our communities’. The reference was to Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, in which ‘hope and history rhyme’ and there is ‘hope for a ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... of the many recent bad news stories about the NHS, its significance underscored by the fact that David Cameron felt it necessary to present the report to the House of the Commons himself, rather than leave it to the secretary of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the ...”

“... In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was ...”

“... in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one side in the same year, stood Johnno, David Malouf’s first prose work. ‘It spread, throughout the Seventies and Eighties, this new ...”

“... or not it is fair to run out the batsman at the bowler’s end when he thinks the ball is dead. In David Horspool’s new study of sport in Britain, the great flashpoints and turning points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness ...”

“... First she remarks that Aphra Behn wrote novels (which she calls ‘novels’) before Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, a work that Ms Goreau asserts is ‘generally termed the first novel’ – by, I must suppose, people who have not read La Princesse de Clèves or Don Quixote, let alone Genji or Daphnis and Chloe. Presently she notices that there were novels ...”

“... of the corporations but now slavishly supporting them goes on and on throughout the book: Geoffrey Robinson who, as Paymaster General, defended the PFI proposals (and the loss of beds) for Walsgrave Hospital in his constituency, and then, when he lost office, rediscovered his opposition to the plan; Alastair Darling, who in opposition denounced the failure to ...”