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“... elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does ...”

“... not be underplayed, it’s worth remembering that the party’s share of the vote was lower under Gordon Brown in 2010 and Ed Miliband in 2015. In terms of seats and numbers, the Conservatives did worse in both 1997 and 2001. The liberal commentariat that was hoping that the Lib Dems would replace Labour as the main party of opposition must be even more ...”

“... about the Raphaels he had been seeing in Rome: There was in him none but the very smallest Michael Angelesque elements – I fancy that I have found after much fumbling & worrying … the secret of his incontestable thinness & weakness. He was incapable of energy of statement … this energy – positiveness – call it what you will – is a simple ...”

“... them to edit, comment upon and add footnotes to: their occupation would be gone. Professor Ian A. Gordon, in his Introduction to The Urewera Notebook,* comments rather severely upon Murry for having ‘discarded, suppressed, edited, and manipulated’ her journals in order to raise up his pious memorial to a dead wife. But the plucking out of harsh views on ...”

“... day. The assassination of Lincoln was a clear scoop. There were many others, the death of General Gordon among them. One of the most romantic ‘beats’ – a word that has gone out of fashion – was the Relief of Mafeking, when a Reuters man sent his dispatch from Pretoria to Lourenço Marques hidden in a sandwich, to escape Boer censorship. Almost equally ...”

“... married and turned his back on the academic career that calmly awaited him in America. As Lyndall Gordon nicely says, in her biography of Eliot, both he and Ezra Pound were ‘lapsed professors’. He was working full-time at Lloyds Bank, where he stayed until 1925, and editing the Criterion in the spare moments he didn’t have. This tale of time swallowed ...”

“... to escape represents a refusal of the whole idea of the castle’s order. Peake told his friend Gordon Smith that reading Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader had made him ‘enormously dejected (in the right sort of way, I think) over Titus Groan’. I feel that what I’m ‘after’ has to a large extent been forgotten while I wrote. What was I after ...”

“... Association a letter from the Solicitor-General to the selfsame Secretary of State for Defence (Michael Heseltine). Neither the Solicitor-General nor Heseltine knew of the leak. The letter, like the document about the Cruise missiles demo, was entirely secret. Though neither document was a threat to national security, both were plainly covered by the terms ...”

“... and castrated in consequence: a romantic figure, like say Tchaikovsky, in an age of epics. Michael Clanchy’s life of him is too serious to count as romance, and too witty to be epic. He writes extremely well, and matches with a wide and happy learning, which runs from Socrates to Eliot and from Cole Porter to Eco, his intense engagement with the mind ...”

“... landscape’. Though he plainly has in mind works by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Rachel Whiteread, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Koons (who in fact used basketballs), Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, once again he doesn’t trouble us with names, as if that would be to indulge such artists further. These swipes are an odd fit ...”

“... unlike Bourdieu he did not lead marches. Some politicians became friends (he got the bus with Michael Foot; Gordon Brown was a dinner guest) and in the late 1970s and 1980s he would catalyse a fierce and consequential debate about the future of the Labour Party through interventions in Marxism Today (interventions that ...”

“... is – Excess: he will rage himself out,’ said Barker’s early friend and mentor Hugh Gordon Porteus. Certainly the vertiginous rhetoric of these poems produces extraordinary effects, sometimes dazzling, sometimes overblown, always surging forward resistlessly. Barker delights in the polysyllabic possibilities of language and the eccentric ...”

“... a beginning to a tragedy. If any couple bore out that maxim it was Annabella Milbanke and George Gordon Byron. The ‘happy’ chapter lasted barely 24 hours, the ‘ever after’ is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s ...”

“... began the countdown to the November re-election date. This campaign gathered such momentum that Michael Heseltine, the obvious contender, would have been badly damaged had he not stood. In June this year the same countdown had begun when Major cut the campaign short with a pre-emptive resignation, his calculation presumably being that the requirement of ...”

“... millennia of ebullient trading and a century of, to put it mildly, muddled planning, Sheppard and Michael Hebbert paint their pictures in the same bright colours: of a healthy, wealthy conurbation, unfathomable, inchoate, yet liveable and boundlessly energetic. London confers prosperity on the rest of Britain rather than drains it away, they say. It is ...”