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“... first came when Churchill in 1942 appointed him Minister Resident at Allied Headquarters in North-West Africa. It is not too much to say that the job ‘made’ him. It was essentially a position which depended on the influence its occupant could exert, not the power, which was negligible. Macmillan had an American mother and he spoke excellent French. As ...”

“... by journalists heaving with indignation at secret service inefficiency and treachery. Nigel West’s book on MI6 looks by comparison, like an exercise in name-dropping. Not that Mr Andrew does not have his throw-away lines. Sir Claude Dansey, that unattractive deputy head of MI6, was, it appears, seduced at the age of 16 by Robbie Ross. Tom ...”

“... back in. A nightmare, my own: to be locked in a dark, stuffy nursery cupboard with Boris, Michael, Nigel and their pals. England will become a place the young want to get out of, in search of fresh air and light.James ButlerThere is​ now a knot at the centre of British politics. If politicians push for inclusion in the European Economic Area, in the hope of ...”

“... into women’s history began. Rowbotham moved from a middle-class Tory Methodist upbringing in the West Riding to a London whose streets were paved with Marxism-Leninism in the approved manner of the times. A restrictive girls’ boarding school where she read extra-curricular Sartre and Kerouac and practised being Juliette Gréco in her time off, the Sorbonne ...”

“... social status in the world; or provocative and combative and rude like Randolph, Edward Stanley, Nigel Birch and others’) and it seems he is unwilling even to be a gentleman. He notes that Somerset Maugham said that Kipling was ‘not quite a gent’. When Kipling said of somebody, ‘He’s a white man,’ Maugham thought: ‘How I wish, in order to ...”

“... when the Normans must have come closest to defeat, probably took place to the ridge’s south-west. The water shown here may well be the ‘sandy brook’ that would have given the field the name Senlac, taken by Freeman from the later but richly detailed account of the Anglo-Norman Orderic Vitalis. We may even glimpse the stakes of the defensive ...”

“... influence is most evident in Day Lewis’s poems in From Feathers to Iron, and in the character of Nigel Strangeways in the detective novels (the appropriately named Strangeways is, as Sean Day-Lewis puts it, ‘every inch W.H. Auden’ – a ‘nordic type’ who ‘can’t sleep unless he has an enormous weight on his bed’). Whatever his early debt to ...”

“... up for lost time. Thus, 99 days after resigning as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Autumn 1989, Nigel Lawson became a non-executive director of Barclays Bank and an adviser within the Barclays Group. His two-day-a-week job was reportedly worth £100,000 a year. Shortly afterwards, he became a director of the GPA Group, then the world’s biggest aircraft ...”

“... his pigs had the fever. ‘If it goes on much longer it will ruin me,’ he said.When I arrived at Nigel Rowe’s farm near Dedham only the weather was Constable-like. Out of his window the fields were bare and flat. ‘European pig meat is cheaper to produce,’ he said, ‘because we have higher standards and higher production costs. As soon as foreign bacon ...”

“... in privilege, in heredity and customary power. He believed in the rights of Lord Shepton, of Nigel de Litham, of the spoiled and impossible Francesca. He believed in it, as Tertullian believed in the incarnation, because it was absurd. Through Francesca he came face to face with the madness that lies at the heart of all legitimate order – the boiling ...”

“... that Goldsmith was intrigued by the personalities of contributors to the magazine, Messrs Waugh, West, Gillard and Marnham, and would have liked to have been editor of Private Eye. Goldsmith’s aversion to the Eye certainly seems to have been different from the conventional dislike. It may have touched off fears of a deep and dangerous conspiracy against ...”

“... the ‘war on terror’ was soaring. At our first meeting, Manning’s Downing Street successor, Nigel Sheinwald, told me angrily that security in Palestine could be achieved by eradicating the ‘virus’ of Hamas from Gaza, and eliminating its ‘disease’ from the region. He had no interest in helping to create legitimate Palestinian security ...”

“... spoke at NatCon. At the ‘gala dinner’, Douglas Murray (whose latest book is The War on the West) insisted that Britons should not be prevented from loving their nation just ‘because the Germans mucked up twice in a century’. The soi-disant anti-elitist tribune Matthew Goodwin – who ate pages of his own book on Sky News after losing a bet he had ...”

“... converted a barge into a makeshift rig, the Sea Gem, which in November 1965 discovered the West Sole gas field off the Norfolk coast. Six days later the Sea Gem capsized with the loss of 13 lives. The search for hydrocarbons in the North Sea led the oil companies into the deepest water and toughest conditions they had ever encountered. In 1964 it was ...”

“... about democracy versus dictatorship, or race, or religion – Shia v. Sunni, for example, or the West v. the East. In our own day this separating-out has even come to colour the Brexit debate. Brexiteers see trade wars as risk-free enterprises which are not prone to slide into actual fighting. President Trump has told us that ‘trade wars are good and easy ...”