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“... power in Whitehall during the six years of the first Wilson Government acquired a fund of George Brown stories. The fact that many were so preposterous as to be incredible did not mean that they were untrue. Even when they redounded to Brown’s credit, which they occasionally did, it was quite possible that they were ...”

“... argue back, convincingly and at length, that it isn’t. Their reasoning has influenced the Brown-Vitter bill, put before the US Senate in April, which seeks to mandate an equity level of 15 per cent for banks with assets of more than $500 billion. At the same time, the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (which has a keen interest ...”

“... new novel, The Topeka School, takes up this problem – one of its narrators, Adam Gordon, calls it ‘the problem of other minds’. We know Adam already, as the Topekan-born poet protagonist of Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, which describes him on sabbatical in Madrid, getting laid, getting fucked up, wondering whether ...”

“... he inherited from the Conservatives. The results of a comprehensive spending review may allow Gordon Brown to give the NHS an extra £1.5-2 billion to mark the 50th-anniversary celebrations. If that happens, it will be a huge victory for Dobson. There are other difficulties facing him, however, which he might prefer to ignore. His most serious ...”

“... on bullying civil servants in the Home Office. The Scottish Raj has included Blair and Gordon Brown from the start; posthumous membership should no doubt be awarded to John Smith, Donald Dewar and Robin Cook. The reformulation of Britishness remains high on their devolutionary agenda, but New Labour politicians can be seen carefully distancing ...”

“... family in Britain received a cheque for a little over £7000, personally signed, as it were, by Gordon Brown.) The Evita-like adulation that ‘Sarah’ was gaining in Alaska began to spread as a rumour through the nation in February, when she was first tipped as a possible running-mate for McCain, with Rush Limbaugh, the far-right radio ...”

“... UN ambition for some states to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid. Others are still up for debate. Gordon Brown recently revived the idea of abolishing the House of Lords. One of Benn’s biggest goals was realised in 2020, when the UK left the EU.The 1983 manifesto was so long and so Bennite because of the party’s right. John Golding, self-described ...”

“... have been a staple of the non-fiction novel, from Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song to Gordon Burn’s horribly fascinating books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West. Andrew Hankinson’s new book dramatises the last days of Raoul Moat, the Newcastle bouncer and bodybuilder who in July 2010 shot his former partner, Samantha ...”

“... Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were long, sometimes fulsome, always affectionate, and full of great table talk and funny stories ...”

“... in prospect, its very favourable treatment of Scotland bought the Union another couple of decades. Gordon Brown’s numbers show ecoomic problems looming for the UK in general – and the Scottish statistics are even worse. A European survey found in September 2001 that the UK had a long-term absent-through-sickness quotient of 7 per cent against 2.1 per ...”

“... scheme would cost an extra £9.8 to £16.4 billion, less than changes made to the tax system by Gordon Brown and George Osborne. Andy Stern suggests a form of UBI giving every American adult $1000 a month, at a cost of $2.7 trillion, to be paid for by getting rid of existing programmes, cutting tax breaks (which cost $1.2 trillion), reducing defence ...”

“... you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed head of the home front, under you’ and that there could be no question of his predecessor, Butler, being accorded the title of deputy prime minister. Barely a year later, after the Suez ...”

“... of egalitarianism. But the special contribution of such Catholic writers as Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy is absent. Percy in particular was no less hostile than Genovese himself to social engineering, country-club greed, cultural tawdriness and hedonistic hippiedom. Finally, he barely refers to any contemporary political ...”

“... and she’s better-looking than Stuart. Last week at lunch, much of the Oscar talk focused on Gordon Wood, Professor of History at Brown. Wood is here on a year’s fellowship to write Volume IV of the new Oxford History of the United Sates, but he has also spent the odd moment reflecting on Matt Damon and Ben ...”

“... it (‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although history suggests that the ...”