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“... to find supporters. English pragmatism, sobriety, professionalism and discipline won the day. Michael Jones, in 24 Hours at Agincourt, endorses this view, as does W.B. Bartlett, both of whom attempt to give hour-by-hour accounts of the battle and its preliminaries. It has become fashionable to try to lend verisimilitude and immediacy to a narrative ...”

“... the law of conquest. In his stimulating work on Medieval literacy, From Memory to Written Record, Michael Clanchy has stressed the importance of this conflict in Medieval culture between the clerks’ notions of records and rights which were expressed in parchment (notions congenial to desk-bound historians) and the notions of warriors, men of the sword. In ...”

“... If Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot had achieved Cabinet rank together in the 1960s, the United Kingdom would be in better shape now. ‘That is my truth,’ as Bevan used to say. ‘Now tell me yours.’ What have they in common, though, this leftist Gang of Three, the Englishman, the Welshman and the Scot, Bevan, his wife and his friend, all from such different backgrounds? They have similar opinions, of course: but what of their human and moral nature, their style of writing and speaking? It may be worth noting that all three are childless and parentful: all three have been devoted to Protestant Christian parents and have (to my regret) firmly rejected the faith of their fathers ...”

“... an agreement with each other even if they had been willing to do so.’ ‘Insight’ quotes Michael Eaton, the now-retired Board spokesman, as drawing on his ten years’ experience of negotiations with Scargill to tell ministers that he would not settle. I believe that settlement was impossible, and that the reasons lay in both the ‘normal’ and the ...”

“... in 15th-century England. Her role, largely forgotten for centuries and thrillingly rediscovered by Michael Jones and Malcolm Underwood in The King’s Mother (1992), might usefully have played a greater part in Kevin Sharpe’s admittedly already massive study of Tudor spin-doctoring. Sharpe’s subject is the considerable range of devices which the Tudor ...”

“... hundreds of thrusting young Fabians and other ambitious New Labour apparatchiks, not to mention Michael Portillo – with just one heroic heckler. She tolerated the cant for well over an hour, her reticence finally breaking when Campbell said that there are good people who go into politics, and bad people: ‘Like you, Campbell, you lying bastard,’ she ...”

“... course, the chance to see and hear David Starkey cheek by jowl with Zadie Smith, Roy Strong, Terry Jones, Michael Holroyd and all the other writers showcasing their various talents this year. Such events certainly seem to be increasing rapidly in number and variety. Cheltenham and Hay-on-Wye (Tony Benn: ‘In my mind, it has ...”

“... Catching news about the Michael Jackson trial, I can’t help being reminded of a caustic song by Dan Bern, a singer less famous than Jackson by several orders of magnitude, called ‘Too Late to Die Young’. ‘The day that Elvis died was like a mercy killing,’ it begins, before turning its attention to the inglorious late careers of other fallen idols of American popular culture, challenging listeners to ‘name the last good film that Marlon Brando made/While trying to keep his kid from going to jail ...”

“... feeling is strengthened by reading Vincent Brome’s diligently researched biography of Ernest Jones. At the end of his life the charming old autocrat remarked that he had always been ‘an old-fashioned materialist’ and a disciple of T.H. Huxley. This is a revealing admission of how little a clever man can learn after the age of 20. It is also some ...”

“... for using his name without permission. There are no less than four limited companies called Thomas Jones, with or without sons and various parenthetical geographical locations. While de Bernières is just going to have to get used to sharing his name, other novelists can indulge themselves for a bit longer. The Companies House website, at ...”

“... of the films showing at the London Film Festival later this month is The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, directed by Philip Noyce, and based on Graham Greene’s novel. (It isn’t the first time the book’s been adapted for the screen: Mankiewicz made a version in 1958 which Greene, who anyway tended to have a very low opinion of ...”

“... About ten years ago I went to see Michael Frayn’s Noises Off in the West End. The play has been revived, and rewritten, many times since its first run in 1982 and its place in the farcical canon is undisputed. One consequence of its (entirely deserved) reputation for being hilarious is that audiences strongly expect it to make them laugh ...”

“... had a private telephone conversation with Mr Parkinson and after. The first-edition story, bylined Michael Jones, Political Editor, had extensive and detailed contradictions of Miss Keays’s version of events by the travelling troupe of Mr Parkinson’s friends, plus the odd insult, and the statement that Mr Parkinson had kept to his side of the ...”

“... though it features in what they have to say about ‘common sense’, where they quote Michael Howard: ‘Whenever there is a conflict between political correctness and common sense, let me tell you where I stand – firmly on the side of common sense!’ ‘Common sense’ here being a Tory euphemism, as Lowe and McArthur point out, for ‘hating ...”

“... At the Party Conference following Labour’s crippling defeat in the 1983 election Michael Foot stood before the massed ranks of the faithful to account for his stewardship of the Party. ‘I am deeply ashamed,’ he began. Unfortunately for Mervyn Jones, who both loves and admires his subject and would have us dwell on other things, it is the freeze-frame of that moment which lives on ...”