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“... question of Diego Garcia, raised, in this group of books, by the Latin American Bureau and by Anthony Barnett. If the kelpers were too few and boring to be rescued, what was wrong with throwing the population of Diego Garcia out of their homes to make way for an American air base? The Diego Garcians too were a distant handful, and would have been ...”

“... for the Brexit vote lay with either economic privation or cultural loss. In The Lure of Greatness, Anthony Barnett, the founder of Charter 88 and co-founder of Open Democracy, has identified a third: the constitution. Those who focus on the economic explanation, for Brexit as for the election of Donald Trump, point to the increasing disparity between rich ...”

“... Report to the Working Party. Asylum. Otiose [preceded by] After, is the most verbose part of Anthony Barnett’s latest book. No logorrhoea here: this writer specialises in costive miniatures, hard little pellets of incommunicativeness, that flummoxed me. In a previous volume, Anthony Barnett showed himself ...”

“... on her paper ‘Cinderella Organises Buttons’. She cowered in the pub lavatory to escape Anthony Barnett, who had been detailed by the board to fetch her, while he stood outside demanding that she come out and discuss her article ‘rationally and politically’. A week later the board received her letter of resignation, which suggested that ...”

“... carry the People in their rucksacks. Primus inter people is the founding director of Charter 88, Anthony Barnett, whose book attempts to recapture for his constitutionalist tendency the drama of ‘our constitutional revolution’: ‘“we the people” – to use a long-coined phrase that may finally become currency in Britain – have ...”

“... to look like essentially English problems. They are worthwhile contests; this book is dedicated to Anthony Barnett, founding spirit of Charter 88, and it glows with admiration for This Time (1997), Barnett’s vain appeal to carry through the momentum of constitutional reform far beyond devolution. But these are battles ...”

“... Bill of Rights has not had a big place on the agenda of the Left. To be fair, Lord Scarman and Anthony Lester (also founder signatories of Charter 88) have long argued that such a Bill was a necessary step in the protection of civil liberties. But the recent history of the campaign for a Bill of Rights lies more, if anything, with Lord Hailsham and the ...”

“... the Falklands. For the broad mass of the people this wasn’t an imperialist war. Freedman quotes Anthony Barnett on some of the ‘symbols’ that surrounded it: ‘an island people, the cruel seas, an Anglo-Saxon democracy challenged by a dictator, and finally the quintessentially Churchillian posture – we were down but we were not out.’ These ...”

“... too, in the beautifully produced, unostentatious separate recent collections by Douglas Oliver and Anthony Barnett,* contributors to the Carcanet volume. ‘America’ is one acknowledged influence on these poets, though ‘America’ turns out to mean chiefly Ashbery, Olson and Pound. That there are other traditions to look to these days is clear from ...”

“... first was Politics and Letters (1979), a big book of specific questions posed by Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern, members of the editorial committee of New Left Review; and of answers, rarely as specific or pointed, offered by Williams. The second section of Politics and Letters includes detailed criticism of The Long Revolution and ...”

“... its centre-left policies – such as free prescriptions and university tuition – through the Barnett formula, an anachronistic bit of multinational accountancy designed to fund a proposed Scottish Assembly in the 1970s (essentially, if spending rises in England, the formula dictates an equivalent rise, calculated on the basis of population, for the three ...”

“... that’s just cheer-leading, not truth-telling – for which Williams was supposedly renowned. Anthony Barnett, for example, writes that ‘Raymond Williams stands for a kind of truthfulness.’ To read Williams on the miners’ strike is to wonder about such a judgment. And it wasn’t just the miners’ strike. Listen to Williams on The Forward ...”

“... largely intact, though many of its props had gone. Now, the alternative is a lot more serious. Anthony Barnett puts this argument strongly in This Time, a study of constitutional revolution due out next month. Keeping the waxworks in business could be a way of concentrating even greater real authority in the prime ministerial function. There is, after ...”

“... and, ultimately, destructive fashion. The question of England in particular, which people like Anthony Barnett had for years been promising would eventually rear its head, did so in 2016, on terms that the Tories could have anticipated but proved ill-equipped to control. English nationalism was the subtext to the Brexit campaign, to the attitudes of ...”

“... To celebrate the launching of the Institute of Contemporary British History, Peter Hennessy and Anthony Sheldon have edited an engaging collection of essays on post-war British governments, starting with Paul Addison on the wartime background to Attlee’s success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John ...”