“... Europe, the Mediterranean and the Far East – a dilemma very well summed up in Professor Michael Howard’s essay on British military preparations for the Second World War. In these circumstances, the policy of appeasement becomes more comprehensible. The moral condemnation which it provoked at the time fades away when we are confronted with the ...”

“... which they are introduced. This whole cast of mind has enjoyed an extended reprise in the work of Michael Oakeshott, which repeatedly advises us to consult practical experience and, when we come to explore those ‘intimations’, as he calls them, which invite us to embark on reform, to be well aware how fragile are the ‘platforms of understanding’ on ...”

“... UK Power Networks and SGN. A number of other former Labour MPs work as industry lobbyists. Michael Dugher is chair of the Betting & Gaming Council – an industry that has donated almost £400,000 to Labour since Starmer ran for leader. ‘I’d be shocked if there isn’t a lobbying scandal in the first year,’ a veteran lobby journalist who covered ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... City to seek out millionaires to conduct the Government’s business: David Simon from BP, Martin Taylor from Barclays Bank, Peter Davis from the Pru, even that devoted Thatcherite Alan Sugar of Tottenham Hotspur. Past Labour Governments had made some small effort to assert their democratic rights over unelected financial power. In the first weeks of the new ...”

“... A bullet scraped his chest before hitting his upper arm, and four or five hit his manager, Don Taylor, who was standing between him and the doorway. The keyboard player’s girlfriend saw ‘a kid’ with his eyes squeezed shut emptying a pistol into the rehearsal area. The lead guitarist, an American session man on his first visit to Jamaica, took cover ...”

“... loves a ‘battle with the waistband’, something that gave her hours of fun with Elizabeth Taylor. But her place in the sun came with His Way: The Unauthorised Biography of Frank Sinatra, which raised Sinatra’s hoodlum status to the point where she was sued for two million dollars. Sinatra dropped the action, and Kelley’s book went to number ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... tension; the stakes are life and death. The best physician-novelists – Arthur Conan Doyle, Michael Crichton (who was also the creator of the show ER) – deploy technical language and scientific reasoning to produce an effect of dazzling competence. For the lay reader, the presence of a scientific authority figure is soothing, the revelation of ...”

“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his beliefs, his ...”

“... was played out. Reviewing Nicholas Bethell’s The Palestine Triangle 30 years ago, A.J.P. Taylor said that no Englishman could contemplate the story of the last years of Mandatory Palestine without some sense of shame. And he added, just as truly, that ‘the role of the American administration was despicable throughout.’ One man who knew what he ...”

“... in the courtroom that day, though I did spot one of his most vocal allies in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, sitting near the back. Chutkan went through a list of his recent remarks and asked the attorneys whether or not each statement would count as a violation of the order. She began with an example from August 2023, when Trump called the District of ...”

“... an actor explore a part and bring greater depth and resonance to it. Trimble and his deputy, John Taylor, are redefining Unionism, and the redefinition is there in the News Letter editorial’s ‘new-sprung modern light’, as Edmund Burke would put it. Something is flying off and out of the caked nest, and it’s not crying ‘yarr yarr yarr’. The comfort ...”

“... These attacks have been concerted, populist and unfair. They have been led by the Home Secretary, Michael Howard (a frequent and bad loser in the courts), and the Chairman of his Party, Brian Mawhinney, who has urged Tory hangers and floggers to write in and complain about lenient sentencing on the part of judges, and has put out as party propaganda a ...”

“... as the end of the 17th century, a self-confessed Puritan like the Paracelsian philosopher Edward Taylor was still ready to deploy the analogy between the restorative capacity of mummy and the redemptive power of communion, when he spoke of Christ’s sacrificial body as ‘his own Mumia in which was the Divine and Humane Power’. Indeed such was the ...”