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“... utterly still obliged to remember his/her place? Toiling over that regal eminence I can imagine Edward VII’s mistresses still feeling constrained to call him ‘Sir’, and without their ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’ royals may feel too naked altogether. Though maybe the discarding of this last rag of distinction gives them a thrill denied to the rest of us ...”

“... ages had always ‘stood up against bad laws’. British trade unionists have done so before. When Edward Heath’s Conservative government tried to micromanage the unions through its 1971 Industrial Relations Act, they organised huge and vibrant demonstrations (the slogan ‘Kill the Bill’ was first used on these demos) and then an effective ...”

“... and protection to get her going; she did it through her own vim and vigour … Does the lord chancellor recall that in the reign of Henry VIII it was made high treason to take an appeal outside this kingdom? … I think one can take back the divergence between our legal system and that of the continent to the Fourth Lateran Council.At times he seems to ...”

“... large number of administrative appointments: he has been departmental head, dean, president and chancellor. I say ‘unexpected’ because Lewis Thomas derives no pleasure from the exercise of power and has never had need to advance his career by such onerous and time-consuming means. Only duty, then, can ever have been his motive for taking administrative ...”

“... the same about another vandal, Lord Falconer, and the scrambled abolition of the office of lord chancellor. About the sport itself Nancy Mitford, no opponent of hunting, was both perceptive and unsentimental: The next day we all went out hunting. The Radletts loved animals, they loved foxes, they risked dreadful beating to unstop their earths, they read ...”

“... been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies.Though I had read Edward Said, I was still shocked to discover for myself how insidiously Israel’s high-placed supporters in the West conceal the nihilistic survival-of-the-strongest ideology reproduced by all Israeli regimes since Begin’s. It is in their own interests to be ...”

“... Claude had not been privy. After his service with George V he had been briefly in the household of Edward VIII and moved smoothly on into the service of his brother, George VI. He had done duty in many of the offices of the household, finally serving as private secretary to the Queen. Even when he had long retired his advice was frequently called on; he was a ...”

“... managed decline. Thatcher was not the only standard-bearer for the anti-Heath factions. There was Edward Du Cann, who represented swashbuckling capitalism; Keith Joseph, who represented high-minded anti-statism; Geoffrey Howe, who represented disciplined proto-monetarism. But she saw them all off easily. In this she was greatly helped by their obvious lack of ...”

“... Buruma. Although Garton Ash finds himself longing for Mrs Thatcher in Yugoslavia, it is the German Chancellor who receives the most abundant accolades. ‘Helmut Kohl is the most formidable politician – and statesman – in Europe. He will not lightly be deflected from the last great task he has set himself,’ he writes. ‘As the 20th century draws to its ...”

“... a saga of American traditions, in which he sought to explore the values of the age through Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant, who are attended by a chauvinist, Basil Ransom. ‘The whole generation is womanised,’ Ransom says. ‘The masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of ...”

“... a score of members sitting in the newly independent Algerian parliament; Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of West Germany; Harold Wilson, on the eve of his first term as prime minister; and François Mitterrand, who as minister of justice approved the execution of at least forty Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French ...”

“... read, in Ignatieff’s book, that it was an annihilatingly hostile letter from Berlin to the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University which ‘put paid to Deutscher’s chances’. The fox is crafty, we know, and the hedgehog is a spiky customer, and Ignatieff proposes that the foxy Berlin always harboured the wish to metamorphose into a hedgehog. All I know is ...”