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“... become obvious that the Tories were going to lose the election? Was it that golden moment when Michael Portillo, that scourge of unnecessary public spending, announced that £60m of public money was earmarked for a new yacht for the richest woman on earth – even though Her Majesty had made it plain she did not want one? Was it this deranged belief in the ...”

“... and it is a truth that would be enthusiastically endorsed by that other great Hazlitteer, Michael Foot – that the proof of this is to be found everywhere in the essays, for no one ‘relished more keenly the passing moments of his existence’. That sense of what life is all about is hauntingly conveyed in Hazlitt’s own words: ‘Liberty is ...”

“... of Edwards rising from his meal in the Savoy Restaurant to watch the Aldermaston marchers, led by Michael Foot and others, and saying to the carver, as he returned to his salmon: ‘I put them up to that.’ No one will learn from Goodbye Fleet Street how to edit a national newspaper or how to raise its circulation, two feats at which Edwards ...”

“... veto an honour for Edward Heath or Harold Macmillan than Tory dons would veto Harold Wilson. Even Michael Foot might have slipped through as a representative of the old order, a Thirties-ish, literary champion of the supremacy of Parliament, who caused offence mainly by mistaking the Cenotaph for the Aldermaston March. But Tony Benn of Westminster School ...”

“... magazine editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely unknown, or, like Orwell, famous for other reasons. This ...”

“... after Wilson’s return to power had things exactly their own way, with the kind permission of Michael Foot. The quintessential document of the times was the Social Contract. This, he says, was ‘widely interpreted as a voluntary agreement to accept restraint in pay demands as part of a wider social agreement’. During the first year of renewed ...”

“... Clint Eastwood of The Outlaw Josey Wales versus the John Wayne of The Searchers. Jimmy Carter and Michael Foot versus Reagan and Thatcher, say. In the end: the difference between the idealistic left and the libertarian right. Somewhere between, possibly, lies freedom that manages to find a way of living with concern and fellowship. This, Fish ...”

“... caused a sensation and silenced Bevan for some time, but you won’t read about it in Michael Foot or Barbara Castle’s endless evocations of ‘Nye, fighting for socialism’. Rathbone, who had no such praise-singers, went home to apologise to her cat, Smuts, for her use of the word ‘feline’. After Somerville, she had returned to do ...”

“... the Socialist Workers Party, which had called for the National Front to be driven off the streets. Michael Foot, on Labour’s left since the 1930s, insisted that ‘the most ineffective way of fighting the fascists is to behave like them.’ The Liberal Party called for a prohibition on marches by ‘extreme left-wing organisations’, a message taken up ...”

“... a gun in the back of his car, the judges said they didn’t believe her. When the Hickey cousins, Michael and Vincent, proved (as they were unable to do at their trial) that they were at a Birmingham garage on the afternoon of the murder, the judges took it they had travelled there directly from the murder. This approach would not work with Brian Sinton’s ...”

“... MI5 man called Peter Wright. Wright was summoned to the Palace. On the one hand, he was told by Michael Adeane, the Queen’s private secretary, that the Palace would do all they could to help, and, on the other, warned that Blunt might mention his trip to Germany after the war, and ordered abruptly not to pursue this particular matter. In the ...”

“... there a (fictional) man behind the moustache? Well, there is a director, who is also Branagh, and Michael Green, a thoughtful and inventive scriptwriter. They give shape and sense to a particular notion of Poirot. But it is Branagh’s acting that makes the notion work. I say this as a non-fan of his Shakespeare films (Hamlet, Henry V, Much Ado about ...”

“... If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it follows that the enemy of Michael Howard is my hero. So awful was Howard’s long reign at the Home Office that many liberals sought democratic relief from the most blatantly undemocratic section of the establishment: the judiciary. It was the strange sound of Law Lords denouncing Howard’s preposterous insistence that ‘prison works’ and the widespread jubilation at his many snubbings in the courts that led to liberal hosannas for the judges ...”

“... as the result of outright negligence by the owners. In 1967 nine miners were killed in a fire at Michael colliery in Scotland. The detailed inquiry which followed blamed the deaths on the poisonous fumes from polyurethane foam which had lined the roofs and walls underground. The National Coal Board promptly banned polyurethane foam from its pits, and sent ...”

“... fact that there was no outcry when the Oxford University Press recently published a book by one Michael Tooley whose theme was a defence of infanticide? How else to explain the lack of public reaction to an article published some time ago in which it was suggested that a handicapped child could be killed and ‘replaced’ with one whose chance of happiness ...”