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“... handiwork. 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 ...”

“... it possible 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 ...”

“... grandly the All Party Alliance, although a wit said that his only allies were Anthony Morton, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday and other Creasey pseudonyms.) His books were popular but not highly regarded, and this worried and baffled him. Why, he asked me once, was there thought to be so much difference between Creasey ...”

“... of the Union that all three are of Scottish ancestry, as is the current Conservative pretender, Michael Gove. Gordon Brown was born in Scotland, went to university there and has represented only Scottish constituencies: and this unalloyed Scottishness undoubtedly worked against him in sectors of the English media and ...”

“... The local context seems the right one to focus on at this early stage of Joan’s career. Mary Gordon is no military specialist, nor a medievalist, yet her account of Joan’s initial motivation rings true: Joan’s mission was a psychological response to the trauma of the church’s destruction and her family’s enforced flight. ...”

“... the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t ...”

“... unhappy. The guiding star of his youth has entirely vanished from his firmament. In 1975 the young Gordon Brown compiled, edited and published a socialist manifesto entitled Red Paper for Scotland. At 24, he had just completed a three-year term as rector of Edinburgh University and chaired the University Court in the face of continuous opposition from some of ...”

“... Train-robber Biggs and murderer Boyle present in their testaments a challenge to our moral reflexes. Both authors have appalling records: South Londoner Biggs with countless petty interviews, conspiracy to commit biography, and now brazen autobiography executed in ruthlessly-priced hard-back, plus indecent exposure on a Sex Pistols waxing: Glaswegian Boyle with an audaciously publicised apologia here compounded in paperback, cold-blooded participation before the fact in a television film witnessed by millions of law-abiding citizens, and flagrant indulgence in the plastic arts (to wit, sculpture with a sharp instrument) under the very noses of the prison authorities ...”

“... to himself, in indirect speech, of watching a movie – no, not a movie, an installation, Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, a version of the famous film slowed down to two frames a second, which was in fact, a note in Point Omega tells us, on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006. The man’s preferred spot for watching the installation is ...”

“... domestic and other curtains would have been almost negligible but for one episode recounted by Michael Freed-land. As an example of what he shyly calls Bernstein’s ‘other side’ the episode has a small but central place in his book; and the fact that its real significance seems to have been lost on him only adds to the verisimilitude of his ...”

“... burning only his half of the proceeds. The background to this event is an anecdote-cum-fable that Michael Caine, as the faithful servant Alfred, tells Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne. There was a bandit in Burma, apparently, who stole jewels at will from almost everyone and was never caught – because he didn’t want and didn’t keep the jewels, he just ...”

“... no legacy, to erase the blood and violence and illegality which formed his own career. This is why Michael Corleone is supposed to stay out of his father’s business, to become respectable, a senator maybe, or the governor of a state; and the whole plot of two movies concerns his reluctant, and then not so reluctant, embrace of what seems to him an ...”

“... More important so far as his literary development is concerned was his meeting in 1917 with Eric Gordon Tombe, of whom he wrote: ‘In mental development I owe more to him than to any other person who has entered my life.’ Tombe was only four years older, a clergyman’s son who had worked as a motor mechanic in Stoke Newington; but to Wheatley he passed ...”

“... Craig, had a career as a designer, director and producer of feminist plays; her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, acted with Irving, but became disillusioned with the English theatre and, like other maverick theatre visionaries since, moved to the Continent, where his (rare) productions and extensive theoretical writings are said to have revolutionised theatre ...”

“... 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 ...”