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“... now has to make Marxist theory an explicit topic of reflection. From the Marxist point of view, as Colin Gordon says here, ‘the trouble with Foucault’s [early] work was that its originality was in inverse proportion to its utility for Marxism.’ The problem Gordon is talking about is better described by ...”

“... The stories​ in Colin Barrett’s first book, Young Skins (2013), assembled a shabby cast of bouncers and pool sharks, small-time gangsters and big-time losers from a dismal Irish town. The narrator of ‘Diamonds’ is typical:I was not well. I was drinking, too much and too often, and had resolved to stop. In the city I had drank away my job, money, a raft of friendships, one woman, and then another ...”

“... for MPs to become ministers. This sounds like a minor wrinkle, but as the essays by Michael Gordon and by Rose Melikan show, it had a significant effect on our constitutional principles. An emerging principle of ministerial exclusion was turned on its head and eventually became our notion of ministerial responsibility. Instead of the legislature ...”

“... of patriots than those of the early 18th-century British journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon or the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. After 1776, in any case, Locke’s influence as a political philosopher declined sharply. By the 1780s Americans of the founding generation were much more likely to invoke the ideas of Montesquieu or William Blackstone ...”

“... by the covers. A sad, thoughtfully dithering photo of the prime minister fronts What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown? The cover of Christopher Harvie’s book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting ...”

“... To that effort, this very fine book makes an important contribution. A decade ago, Michael Gordon, a reporter with the New York Times, and Bernard Trainor, a retired US Marine Corps lieutenant general, collaborated on The Generals’ War, still perhaps the best narrative history of the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. Cobra II, a worthy successor, is ...”

“... Paul Foot has a shocking story to tell, the story of Colin Wallace. It is, quite literally, a story of gunpowder, treason and plot. The fact that Foot’s publishers have had to rush the book out in weeks in order to beat the deadline of the new Official Secrets Act, and have deliberately forsaken all advance publicity for fear of pre-emptive action against the book, says something rather disgraceful about the difficulty of getting a fair hearing in this country ...”

“... the SNP campaign for ‘Scotland’s Penny’ – their commitment not to implement in Scotland Gordon Brown’s cut in the standard rate of income tax from 23p to 22p in the pound – has been rubbished by the newspapers, the tabloids in particular, which have fallen in behind Labour and the Union. In the event the campaign did not turn on the national ...”

“... for parliamentary reform and a popular clamour against Catholic relief, which culminated in the Gordon Riots, the largest popular disturbance in 18th-century Britain. An alternative view, associated with E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and – in a hyperbolic version – with Roger Wells’s Insurrection (1983), emphasises ...”

“... unattended for three days after an accident on the A9 was reported to the police (they both died). Gordon Wilson, a former leader of the SNP, has called for the break-up of the national police service, and the creation of four new regional forces. Yet, this brouhaha notwithstanding, the controversy over police reforms has not translated into a perception of ...”

“... as long as it takes to read the hook. The same expectation holds good when a novelist proposes, as Gordon Burn does in his new novel Fullalove, that not green cheese or God’s love but black pus – meaningless suffering, and an appetite for meaningless suffering – is the basic building-block of the universe. The narrator is a journalist in his ...”

“... excavated by a distinguished group of historians, including Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock, offered a compelling account of the reasons British Americans broke with monarchy and then embarked on such a distinctive constitutional experiment, hedged with an idiosyncratic Bill of Rights. For example, the curiously tangled ...”

“... Corbyn isn’t likely to prove a doughty champion of the Union. Moreover – the efforts of Gordon Brown apart – there has been a striking lack of imagination and verve in pro-Union campaigning. Better Together was known – by friend and foe alike – as Project Fear, but it was hardly remarkable for its spine-chilling flair. The baton now passes ...”

“... In a moment which anticipated the notorious Granita conversation of 1994 between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he told Stafford Cripps that ‘any time you wish it I shall always be ready to retire in your favour.’ As Bew remarks, ‘That conversation hung in the air for a number of years.’ For, when the ailing and assailed Lansbury formally stepped down ...”

“... Colin Kidd’s study of Scottish Unionism goes, as he himself insists, sternly against the prevailing ideological current, which is focused on the emergence of political nationalism in both Scotland and Wales. Kidd thinks his book will serve its purpose if it unsettles this debate, and brings about a revision of ‘the basic categories of political analysis ...”