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“... likes, and the only brake on his power is how much he can get his own backbenchers to sign up to. So a leader can, after winning a general election, in effect take the phone to the electorate off the hook for the next four and a half years. This is not an accident, it is the way the system is supposed to work: a fundamental democratic deficit, designed to ...”

“... My copy of Plats du Jour now gives forth a mellow smell of old paper; the pages are crisp, brown and dry as Melba toast. But it has outlasted the husband for whose pleasure I bought it by some eighteen years, proof positive of the old saw, ‘Kissin’ don’t last, cookin’ do.’ And now it is a historic object, a prototype of the late 20th-century ...”

“... It won’t do, for example, to assert that John Kennedy was shot by Jackie Kennedy, because it’s clear from the film footage of the assassination that he wasn’t. Of course, you could make a case for that footage being faked, but how then would you account for eyewitness reports? Best not to go there. A decent conspiracy theory is made up of hard ...”

“... its old strongholds, social democracy is now unmistakably on the defensive. In Britain, Labour’s social democratic right is a small minority of the party outside Parliament, and has only a bare majority even in the Parliamentary Party. The equivalent Conservative tradition – the tradition once exemplified by Harold Macmillan and Iain Macleod – is in ...”

“... integrity, his passion and his blithe disdain for success, more radiant than gloomy. At 87, it’s his life, and he has resolved to treat it as a journey, a floating down the river, as if he had sometimes been unsure of where he was going, undistracted by ambition. Boorman may be the most inspired and wayward of English directors since Michael Powell.Not ...”

“... have less frequently turned to painting, which may explain why many art historians have found it so difficult to believe that the Florentine sculptor and goldsmith Andrea Verrocchio (1435-88) took up painting relatively late in his career and then abandoned it on recognising the extraordinary ability of his pupil Leonardo. This is what Vasari claims in his ...”

“... pub arguing that nuclear power-stations ‘should all be put in the Hebrides where there’s nobody to blow up’). But Scottish nationalism, and perhaps even nationhood is now active again, aware of the new offshore resources, less sapped by the chronic bleeding of emigration (the nett annual loss of 44,000 people has been halved), and now boosted by ...”

“... thought. Consider a typical reaction from the morning after the election, Aaron Sorkin’s rant on the Vanity Fair website: ‘The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons … misogynistic shitheads everywhere … If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through ...”

“... and nearly two hundred years ago in France. It is a point made forcefully by Andrzej Wajda’s latest film, which depicts the struggle between Danton and Robespierre – between humanist and puritan, pragmatist and idealist. Wajda intended it as an allegory on the present-day state of Poland. But his message is painted on a broader canvas. The terror ...”

“... growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per ...”

“... Too late, David Copperfield realises that he has married an imbecile: Dora is good-looking and affectionate, but she’s useless with a cookery book and incapable of managing servants. She calls her husband ‘Doady’ and begs him to accept that she can never be more to him than a ‘child-wife ...”

“... of conviviality and general bonhomie enveloped the gathered crowds.’ Not always. On New Year’s Eve 1811, several New Town gentlemen were relieved of their valuables and a widely despised police watchman was beaten to death by Old Towners. The violence was blamed on gangs (which were certainly involved) and the corrupting influence of prostitutes. In the ...”

“... been a byword for enduring monumentality, and some of the items on display in the Royal Academy’s exhibition Bronze (until 9 December) are 5700 years old, apparently. They are a small selection from a hoard of ceremonial objects with animal motifs found wrapped in a reed mat in a cave near the Dead Sea in the 1960s. Other bronze objects fell out of boats ...”

“... As the Conservative Party in the country clearly favoured Clarke, the Parliamentary Party’s gratuitous act of unilateral leadership disarmament was, so far as I know, the only occasion in the 20th century when either the Conservative or the Labour Party in Parliament was more extreme than its members in the ...”

“... Lynda Nead​ ’s new study of the ways in which postwar Britain was represented by what was not yet called its media is tirelessly oblique. She contrives to see everything through the reductionist lenses of colour and colourlessness. She leans heavily on Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’ which supposedly defines the ‘particular and characteristic colour of a period ...”