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“... with the issue, sometimes against what might have been thought their natural judgment. In the Heath Government we find the old imperialist, Julian Amery, emerging as an advocate of joint sovereignty with Argentina. Two years later, Jim Callaghan, the new Foreign Secretary, is countermanding this, and for Charlton he recalls the minute he sagely ...”

“... wear double-breasted suits with lapels as large as Mosley’s. The Notting Hill serial murderer John Christie was put in one of the police cells after his arrest in March 1953, the detective said. Four months later, after he was tried and sentenced, he was executed at Pentonville Prison in Islington. According to the detective, the gallows equipment was ...”

“... hitmen (Brian ‘The Milkman’ Wright, ‘during his drug-dealing days he always delivered’; John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, once ‘one of Britain’s richest men, owning a fleet of private planes, helicopters, boats and cars’), and every few pages there’s a soap star in her knickers, usually followed by a report, written with barely contained ...”

“... the wife of Michael Foot. One morning in 1952 Craigie had driven Koestler around Hampstead Heath on yet another of his house-hunting expeditions, which degenerated into a pub crawl, though Craigie drank only ginger beer. Afterwards Koestler bullied Craigie into making him an omelette at her home. The meal done with and, rather prosaically, the ...”

“... was the response in the early 1970s, when Anthony Barber, chancellor of the exchequer in Edward Heath’s government, made his ‘dash for growth’. While never doctrinaire, Heath had begun as something of an economic liberal; but the upshot of Barber’s great inflation was a massive expansion in government economic ...”

“... and their own duties seemed looser than in the ward below. But it was the presence of Roger and John, the two residents mentioned above, which accounted for most of the noise and disorder in the room itself. They also introduced a kind of comedy that was quite inseparable from the pathos of the position they were in. Roger, as I shall call him, a man in his ...”

“... of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing ...”

“... now, when they are so far behind in the opinion polls, they propose to recover by transforming John Major into a Europhobic John Bull. The other key to Conservative success was organisation. As Parliamentary reform acts expanded the electorate, the Conservatives recruited a mass membership in the constituencies. These ...”

“... leaders were being hounded for instant comment. Crucially, Labour’s Defence Spokesman, John Silkin, went onto the important World at One radio programme, and seemed to commit the Opposition to a belligerent reaction. Uncharacteristically, I leapt to my telephone to ask what was going on, and was calmed down by Anne Carleton, his long-term personal ...”

“... for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on ...”

“... have to go to the wall. There was no room for lame ducks as there had been in the dark days of the Heath Administration of the early Seventies. That government’s slackness towards ailing companies had ushered in all sorts of horrors – strong trade unions, a Labour government. As she had said a thousand times, there would be no ‘U-turn’ for hers. Market ...”

“... working-class audience to a delirium of delight. He laughed at the new technocratic Tory leader, Heath, just as he laughed at the ‘ancestral voices’ of Heath’s predecessor, the 14th Earl of Home. The whole place resounded to his humour and his confidence. It was the high peak of British social democracy. Wilson’s ...”

“... medieval wall-paintings. It’s an immensely appealing place, not unlike Lead in Yorkshire or Heath near Ludlow. Good graves on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock ...”

“... tide has suddenly turned. The tirade against Brussels from Mrs Thatcher’s former adviser, Sir John Hoskyns, was not well received by the Institute of Directors he was still serving. Opinion polls show and the results of the Euro-elections confirm that outright hostility to the Community is no longer an obvious winner. Mrs Thatcher is suffering both from ...”

“... elsewhere – it looked as though the difficulties were being tackled. We had joined the EEC under Heath and successfully renegotiated the terms of our membership under Wilson. As in most of the rest of Western Europe, what the French called concertation and we called ‘tripartism’ was the order of the day. In office, the Conservatives had painlessly ...”