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“... demonstrating the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine the implications of the change in policy from war to peace after 1629. He ignores the two peace treaties of 1630, and the Goa treaty of 1635, which marked a new turn in foreign and trading ...”

“... Michael Ryan’s memoir, Secret Life, is a book essentially unthinkable before the triumph of the therapeutic in contemporary American life. By virtue of its core subject-matter – the consequences of Ryan’s sexual molestation when he was five and what he terms his subsequent ‘sexual addiction’ as an adult – it raises the ante enormously in the matter of sexual revelation and explicitness ...”

“... clearly you don’t have the brains of a seven-year-old.’ There is the dinner party for Michael Jackson at Hepburn’s New York townhouse, where the singer is silent on all topics except the pleasure he has in watching his pet boa constrictor eat small rodents. And there is the saga of Warren Beatty, with Berg’s help, recruiting Hepburn for Love ...”

“... book on the film, it is the awkwardness of the main characters, played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, their touching, strangling inability either to deny their feelings or fully act on them, that makes them so compelling. This is not the luminous, high-temperature romance of the Italian movie, and neither Johnson nor ...”

“... Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day. Elsewhere assignations are arranged, faces stuffed, drinks swilled ...”

“... successfully did in 1931. The question is, who comes closest to Baldwin? In some ways, it is Michael Ancram, a traditional figure who could probably hold the Party together better than the other candidates. But, unlike Baldwin, he represents the Party’s past rather than its future. The obvious answer is Ken Clarke. He had the support of the Party ...”

“... movement saw themselves as armed militants to the Officials’ political compromisers. For them, Michael Collins had said all there was to say about the value of words in the struggle against the Crown when he gave the oration at the funeral of Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike in 1917: ‘That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it ...”

“... The ‘raft of laws’ of which he now disapproves seems to have emanated exclusively from Michael Howard, when the Government was already on its last legs. Alexander’s book is a compelling account of what the powerful in our society now mean by democracy; his is the authentic voice of post-democratic liberalism and his version of democracy both ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... At the start of the inquest in December, an application for an indefinite adjournment was made by Michael Mansfield QC on behalf of the Lawrences. ‘Dramatic’ new evidence had been unearthed and the family planned to use this in a private prosecution. If the inquest proceeded it might prejudice such a prosecution. The Coroner granted the request. It was ...”

“... rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an earlier generation of Tory modernisers, and a core group of Old Etonians and 1990s Central Office staffers, these men have set about giving the party ...”

“... to the high point it enjoyed during the Second World War, first under Frank Owen and then under Michael Foot. Editing the Evening Standard was a much tougher task for Wintour than for his more recent successors, since the Rothermere Evening News was still in his time outselling its rival in the London market by roughly half a million copies every ...”

“... following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians. His first article had been an analysis of the relationship ...”

“... from all quarters, the House of Lords in January’s debate has, in the memorable words of Michael Howard, presented the Government with a dog’s dinner, by passing two mutually inconsistent amendments, at the instance of Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively. There are now three options for him to consider: he can seek to push through ...”

“... a poem that sounds more like the work of art it imitates than any other I know.* The painting of Howard Hodgkin is a first-rate example of the vivid muteness that resists critical attempts at conversation. Vasari himself, after praising this man’s power as a colourist, would have had trouble explaining the relationship of the paintings to their ...”