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“... though at the service it goes unremarked. 20 May. One of the many depressing features of George Osborne is that his rhetoric about the poor and supposedly shiftless can be traced in a direct line to exactly similar statements voiced in the 17th century and thereafter. Osborne may well be proud of being part of such a long ...”

“... soil in the face of the sheriff’s cruel tax raids. Here is the Conservative chancellor, George Osborne: We choose aspiration. This budget backs the self-employed, the small business owner and the homebuyer. We choose families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in ...”

“... cuts in public spending can only be an enormous gamble. Despite confident assertions by George Osborne, no one can really know what the result will be. Cameron – commonly seen as a Conservative in a tradition that distrusts ideas in politics – has embarked on one of the boldest experiments in British political history. Even more remarkably, Clegg ...”

“... sister were suspected of incest when they were discovered in bed together, ‘both bareheaded’. John Donne was exploring a metaphysical extreme of sensuality when he wrote a poem in praise of ‘full nakedness’: a poem which describes his lover’s clothes, but not her body, and in which his hands rove in unexplored places, like those not of a ...”

“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions do, the admonishment of the ...”

“... of his expenses claims. Now he discovers that there is an article by one of his predecessors, John Major, which attacks him in highly personal terms. He decides he must ring the Telegraph’s editor to put the record straight. He has to do this on a train to Bradford, where he is due to unveil a memorial in honour of a local police officer, Sharon ...”

“... prices too, chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and ...”

“... of the witchhunt. Of her two co-defendants at the beginning, Sarah Good denied everything, Sarah Osborne accused Sarah Good. The self-owned witch Tituba has consequently become, in the ever-swelling literature about the horrors of Salem, the catalyst for the tragedy: hers was the original, circumstantial account which proved witchcraft was at work in the ...”

“... Later we had other Popes who, we were told, were also jolly good, but even the warm feeling about John XXIII never approached the devotional cult around Pius XII. There was a sense of real surprise that he wasn’t beatified and canonised as soon as he died. The nuns had told us that he couldn’t officially be declared a saint while he was alive but once he ...”

“... of the plot. Just don’t speak to the audience. I have always found this prohibition difficult. John Gielgud, who was in my first play, thought talking to the audience was vulgar. Then he was prevailed upon to try it and thereafter would seldom talk to anybody else. I understand this and even in my most naturalistic plays have contrived and relished the ...”

“... Nor, in its manifestations, can bias best be measured by the corporation’s excesses, such as John Ware’s Panorama hit-job on Corbyn broadcast three days before voting closed in the leadership election (Ware sneering about Corbyn’s ‘friends’ over unidentified footage of Hizbullah soldiers marching in black balaclavas). It’s more a matter of the ...”

“... story has been mythologised. The only one who didn’t want to be her was her immediate successor. John Major got the job because people were finally sick to the back teeth of Thatcher’s governing style. It is hardly surprising that political leaders should try to avoid replicating the failure that immediately preceded their arrival at the summit. Major set ...”

“... the public and professional burdens of monarchy, while the Queen preferred the domestic privacy of Osborne and Balmoral. As she once remarked, with only slight exaggeration, she ‘had always disliked politics, and did not consider them a woman’s province’. But then Albert died. Like many a Victorian woman, the Queen wanted to withdraw into the ...”