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“... as his press secretary a seasoned hack with no illusions about how the media work. He chose Tom Baldwin of the Times, by all accounts about as unillusioned as they get. I assume the point of hiring Baldwin was to have a News International insider who could mix it with the likes of Andy Coulson, although that’s ...”

“... cabinet. This was crucial to his calculation that he should continue to work under Corbyn. As Tom Baldwin’s biography makes clear, Starmer wanted power.Starmer​ has a huge capacity for hard work and has written a number of books, mainly doorstoppers with titles like European Human Rights Law. When he began making notes for an ...”

“... How bogus was Baldwin? When he said in 1925, ‘I give expression, in some unaccountable way, to what the English people think’, the statement was, as Philip Williamson notes in this ambitious new assessment, ‘in any literal sense … untrue’. Similarly with his claim to be ‘voicing what is in the minds of the dumb millions of this country’, though there the assertion was so framed as to make falsification more difficult ...”

“... I have suggested, but they do meet with heavy visual competition. There are always shoot-outs, and Tom Cruise does a lot of running. In the first film he hangs from a long wire to make a CD copy of a file from a computer inside CIA headquarters. In the new one there is a nearly failed parachute drop, a rooftop chase in London, a lot of motorised whizzing ...”

“... non-ideological. Its most effective prime ministerial proponents, besides Salisbury, were Stanley Baldwin (1923-24, 1924-29, 1935-37) and Margaret Thatcher (1979-90), who shared his knack for condensing a political philosophy into a simple (and simplifying) phrase, as well as his ability rhetorically to align the interests of the nation with the interests of ...”

“... savage in Conrad’s steamship.’ He could have added that American literature is too, from Uncle Tom to Nigger Jim to Porgy and Bess and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. The Americans, under the guidance first of the great W.E.B DuBois, then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the ...”

“... the more marvellous the translation – as Borges reminds us in ‘The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro’. Borges is only one of the many writers who were drawn to use the story in one way or another, among them Trollope, Patrick White, Robin Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin ...”

“... at their charts of ‘The Capetian Kings’ or ‘The Royal House of Jerusalem to 1187’ – ‘BALDWIN I (1100 – 1181) m. (1) Godvere of Tosni (2) daughter of T’oros (3) Adelaide, countess of Sicily’ – and getting up from their desks with a feeling of justified completion and a mutter of ‘well, that’s that!’ Here are the pedigrees; here the ...”

“... in Corinthian exile, Timo becomes ruler of Syracuse. There are times when he sounds like a super Baldwin or Attlee, blending pacific gestures and ruthless action. ‘Reject one faction, support another,’ he advises. ‘But only for a period. The best strive to undermine their own authority.’ Attlee-like, he says little, but provokes speech from ...”

“... more damaging to her image, if it were true. In that instance, it was said that as the daughter of Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, and granddaughter of Robert II ‘the Pious’, King of France, she proudly refused a marriage proposal from William Duke of Normandy, on the grounds that he was illegitimate and she would not demean herself to marry a bastard. At ...”

“... one is hollow, misconceived or false. It is not true, to start with, that Mosley, always known as Tom, entranced everyone from the moment that, as a war veteran of 22, he was elected as the Conservative Unionist MP for Harrow, the youngest member of the House. On the contrary, something about him apart from his wealth and glamour instantly aroused ...”

“... little reason to blame the media when things went wrong. This Other Club consists principally of Baldwin, Attlee, Heath, Callaghan and Thatcher. Attlee consented to have a telex machine installed in Downing Street only so that he could keep up with the cricket scores. When Hugh Dalton had to resign after leaking the contents of his budget to a passing ...”

“... that unattractive deputy head of MI6, was, it appears, seduced at the age of 16 by Robbie Ross. Tom Driberg was ‘put under pressure’ by MI5 to inform on the Communist Party (he was an uninhibited homosexual cruiser) until, Andrew deduces, he was shopped by Anthony Blunt and expelled from the Party by Pollitt in 1941. If, however, we set on one side the ...”

“... his successors in our own time. Many of them found they were ‘doing well by doing good’, as Tom Lehrer puts it in another connection, and the popular profitability of Emily Post linguistics has been another (though surely minor) reason for despising it in academic circles. A more select party has been less concerned with elegance and correctness than ...”

“... him pushed him out of his Tory imperialism towards a form of socialism. Together with his brother Tom, he joined the Fabian Society in October 1907; then in January 1908 – a much more crucial step – he joined the Stepney ILP. The 16 branch members were all trade-unionists, so Attlee himself joined the National Union of Clerks. For seven years, up to the ...”