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“... maxims in politics ought to be established with great caution.’ Coming down to our own day, Anthony Quinton wrote in The Politics of Imperfection (1975) of ‘the anti-theoretical tendency of conservatives generally’, stressing their concern with ‘the dangerous unreliability of abstract theoretical constructions in the domain of human ...”

“... as an MP. Even his tastes in fiction, where his favourite modern authors were Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, suggested the claret-loving socialite rather than the mining-bred socialist. During his second spell at the Home Office in 1974-76 he oversaw important legislation promoting gender and racial equality, and introduced a much needed independent ...”

“... white type on silver. But readers too are easily unsettled. When Penguin had paperback rights to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, the covers used drawings by Osbert Lancaster. Later, when Powell moved publishers, there were drawings by Marc Boxer. Lancaster’s are less intrusive because they show places ...”

“... and often very funny, descriptions of the people he disapproves of (such as Mrs Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Ian Paisley, the Royal Family and Jesus Christ) engaged in eccentric forms of sexual intercourse. One might almost assume from a few of these scatological diatribes that he thought there was something intrinsically disgusting and automatically degrading ...”

“... has to be reconstructed as he appeared at the time in the eyes of respectable opinion: the Enoch Powell of the day. Alas, biographers often confine their sympathy to a single individual and his allies, and so it is here. The wealth of research is flawed by a determination to prosecute ‘the guilty men’ on Churchill’s behalf. But if the function of ...”

“... be a matching of talents. Henry Kissinger should have written about, say, Lloyd George, Enoch Powell or, perhaps now, Anthony Wedgwood Benn. And Jimmy Carter, forgetting his own unhappy passage, should have turned to, say, Alec ...”

“... success of Fortunes of War, the 1987 TV version of her two trilogies set in the Second World War (Anthony Burgess, a fan, called them a hexateuch), was the visual sumptuousness: the arrival in Bucharest of the train carrying the young British Council teacher and his new wife; the Athens settings of the wife’s romance with one British officer and her ...”

“... gambit paid off. Trump filled Scalia’s seat with Justice Neil Gorsuch. Soon after, Justice Anthony Kennedy retired. At 81, Kennedy was older than a Supreme Court judge should be; but he wasn’t ill (and is still alive). Nevertheless, he decided that President Trump and the Republican Senate were the ones he wanted to nominate and confirm his ...”

“... that Adams was guilty? And if we don’t, why does he get an entry? Wickedness, in the case of Anthony Blunt, actually pays off rather handsomely. He gets a four-column entry against the average two, and it is unlikely that this would have been his lot had he been listed merely as ‘art historian’ and not also as ‘a communist spy’. (Donald ...”

“... the only other lengthy attempt by an English novelist to handle part of World War Two as a theme. (Anthony Powell’s three relevant volumes in The Music of Time are too closely woven into the rest of the series to be considered.) The characteristic English novel of the past half-century has been marked, not only by realism rather than fantasy, but also ...”

“... by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might distract attention from the proper Parliamentary forum, the floor of the House. On their view, this would damage the position of individual members and of Parliament itself. Moreover, as Priscilla ...”

“... to race’ as well. He didn’t consider it a coincidence that the West Midlands produced Enoch Powell. Four years after Hall’s house-hunting expedition, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Clair Wills doesn’t write about it until almost the end of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar ...”

“... education and marriage to a millionaire, Benn has descended from Viscount Stansgate through Anthony Wedgwood Benn to Tony Benn, his suits becoming baggier, his hair longer and his cool, posh voice flattening out. She has striven to be regal, he to be proletarian. Both have unfinished agendas: hers assumes a further purging of the remnants of state ...”

“... educational advantage and career opportunities over the past century and a half. Her mother, Anne Powell, came from a decidedly unintellectual background: Anne’s father, George Powell, was a lieutenant colonel in the Grenadier Guards and briefly a Tory MP, while his wife was the daughter of a brewing family; Anne was a ...”

“... proposition for the Conservatives, if hard to implement. In the 1950s, the Tory prime ministers Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan championed home ownership, and politicians and financiers became keener on the idea of enabling the working class to own shares. The Wider Share Ownership Council, founded in 1958, promoted schemes such as employee share ...”