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“... of a ‘national crisis’. On 1 April 1996, the Monday of Easter week, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, made a surprise statement full of foreboding about imminent IRA violence and the need for immediate legislation to prevent it. Various lacunae in the law had been discovered which it was now suddenly deemed essential to fill. Naturally, having ...”

“... his various capacities as think-tank director, Daily Telegraph leader-writer and speechwriter for Michael Howard, he has been agitating against the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU throughout the 25 years since he was a student politician at Oxford. As an MEP he helped persuade David Cameron to withdraw the Tories from the conservative-liberal ...”

“... Perhaps the real test of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of decorously unfeminist women. Louise ...”

“... after suffering several strokes. He was given a military funeral at Long Ashton, the village near Bristol to which he and his wife, Annie, had retired. But then, amazingly, he had a second great ceremonial funeral through the streets of London, his body carried on a gun carriage draped in the Union flag, from the Guards’ Chapel to St ...”

“... accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having been to look at a very grand house for his magazine (World of Interiors), the expensive decoration of which included several Ben Nicholsons. This reminded me that over the ...”

“... started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather pudgy face. The Farouk ...”

“... and French national carriers. He had another claim to consideration, too. He was the MP for the Bristol constituency that contained the Filton plant, and he had been a steady friend to Concorde ever since it was first mooted. So he was owed a favour. But, as it happened, Trubshaw liked this Secretary of State. ‘He had an outstanding brain,’ the test ...”

“... in the west of England, I was pleased to find there was still one small family chocolatier left in Bristol, producing chocolates by hand in an old atelier in the city centre.2 My heart sank when the artisan patriarch launched into a tirade about how most of the children born at the local maternity hospital were born to foreigners. I liked his localism, until ...”

“... their eyes back on the pre-reform era, saw little reason to dispute its unsavoury reputation. Even Michael MacDonald, whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in ...”

“... it had been ‘cleansed of the Jewish taint’ and was now run by Aryans.Edward arrived at the Bristol, where he had stayed many times before, to find that it, too, was NSBO and its ‘genial manager [had] been superseded’. He went to the Rothschild Bank in Renngasse (currency restrictions having left him short of cash), but its doors were closed and ...”

“... In an essay on ‘Religious Anger and Minority Rights’, Tariq Modood, the director of Bristol University’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, wrote that ‘the group which feels hurt is the ultimate arbiter of whether a hurt has taken place.’ On this view, to experience the feeling is to suffer the injury.Rushdie’s defenders ...”

“... on the Ottoman Empire in 1916-18, and whose high commissioner to Turkey from 1919 to 1927, Admiral Bristol, advocated further ethnic cleansing after it. Since America contained Greek and Armenian communities that needed to be silenced, it was there that the casuistries of later negationism were first developed in the interwar years, before they had much ...”