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“... took over four hundred thousand words to chronicle – an average of around five hundred words a day; but since some days apparently only merited a few lines and others none at all, this means that it was not uncommon for a day to receive a thousand or even fifteen hundred words of description. In a way this is fair ...”

“... the Tories insist, merely pretending. Much of this ‘renewal’ had, of course, been achieved by Neil Kinnock and John Smith, while the numerical and political decline of the unions, together with a change in the composition of the electorate and the Labour Party’s membership, made ‘renewal’ much easier and, at least to some ...”

“... The abject surrender of Neil Hamilton, the ‘envelope man’ who changed the law so that he could sue the Guardian for libel, deprived the nation of an exhilarating and informative court case. When the Guardian alleged that Hamilton, Tory MP for Tatton, had taken money from Mohammed AI Fayed, chairman of Harrods to lobby Parliament against a Department of Trade inquiry which eventually denounced Fayed as a liar, the cocky MP announced that he was at last going to get even with the liberal press ...”

“... the image of war. That effort, failing in Vietnam, produced the news reporter as American hero – Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersch, Jonathan Schell, Peter Arnett. They reported not only the war the government did not want its citizens to see, but also the government efforts to invent a war for domestic consumption. ‘Part of the Vietnamese ...”

“... which has taken us to the ‘Chariots of Kinnock’ broadcast of the last election, in which Neil and Glenys walked hand in hand on sunlit clifftops against a soundtrack of doctored Brahms. The fact that it was Labour and not their opponents which had contrived this little masterpiece merely served to underline the extent to which television values have ...”

“... of domesticity. The topic was not thought worthy of attention by the academic historians of the day, who saw their subject matter as public affairs, not private life. It was left to a couple involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, the architect Charles Henry Bourne Quennell and his wife, Marjorie, a painter, to produce four volumes of an immensely ...”

“... The Great Man was not actually dumped, however, until 21 September 1794, the day the body of the martyred radical Jean-Paul Marat entered. In 1797 the relatively conservative regime wanted to bring Mirabeau back, but his body was nowhere to be found. (This was not the only lost body: the hero of Verdun in 1792, General Nicolas-Joseph ...”

“... of the evocative power of detail, to learn that a chance meeting with Willa’s old friend, A.S. Neil, led to the Muirs moving to join his experimental school at Hellerau – the very school to which Kafka had urged his sister Elli to send her ten-year-old son: ‘You should send young Felix there. It will save him from the mean, lukewarm, squinnying spirit ...”

“... not been overtaken in the sense that his arguments have been more effectively put by some latter-day successor. Indeed, the statement of a coherent intellectual case against the present government’s social policies seems for the moment to be largely left to the features writers of the Financial Times, which might have surprised Tawney a little. But he ...”

“... plummeted over a hundred points (although the exchange rate of the pound hardly moved). That night Neil Kinnock addressed a large and responsive audience at a rally in Sheffield, and his triumphalism symbolised Labour’s growing conviction that they were going to win. Indeed, the assumption began to dominate commentary both on the radio and in the ...”

“... at the Cabinet Office to English Partnerships’ own answering service. It was hard to find a good day to talk. First there was the business with the dome. Greenpeace had run a canny media campaign alerting us to the fact that the skin of the dome would be manufactured from PVC, and to make it even more sinister, this was German PVC. ‘Softeners’ which ...”

“... the time like unsubtle intimidation, or cheap showmanship. His refusal to be interviewed by Andrew Neil, and his insistence that ministers boycott the Today programme (now relaxed, temporarily at least, so that Matt Hancock, the health minister, can inform the nation about Covid-19) seemed more like instances of a general aversion to scrutiny than of a ...”

“... be too young – perhaps between 11 and 15’). But the honour was tarnished. On dress rehearsal day, I clumsily trod on a plastic bag belonging to the Bishop of Durham’s son (envied and reviled because a chauffeur drove him to school, though in a modest Citroën 2CV). The bag contained eight mugs, collected in the Bishop’s Palace, painstakingly chosen ...”

“... a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On my little TV, where the picture was jumpy at first, was Jack Kerouac. He was sitting up ...”

“... knew Dylan wouldn’t be coming: substitution and displacement were therefore the order of the day. Not one Dylan but a dozen competing Dylan lookalikes, some of whom performed not Dylan songs but imitations composed for the occasion. Dylan was represented by the marketing of his ...”