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“... Turn and turn about, it is the throne that moves and not the king. Five minutes I remained at the foot of the coffin, until I understood how unequivocal was the stillness and the silence. And I the only person in the room. I moved round to the side and touched his hand: toneless clean chilled meat. Another minute gazing on the face (some kind of plastic ...”

“... was supported in this enthusiasm for a European alternative by the Secretary of State for Defence, Michael Heseltine. Heseltine was an expert in subservience to the Pentagon. He had enthusiastically supervised the deployment of American Cruise missiles in Britain, and had based his British nuclear ‘deterrent’ policy on the American-made Trident missile. He ...”

“... picked from the gardens of Newstead Abbey. ‘Iris Origo, like Byron, was soaked in Italy,’ said Michael Foot, who cited her book as the inspiration for his own writings about the poet. The comment is apposite also for The Merchant of Prato, which is steeped in the landscape and culture of Tuscany as much as in a particular period of its history. Though ...”

“... else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her ...”

“... him three times for the same offence. He went to prison for 42 years. There he met Pat Pottle and Michael Randle, who had been sent to prison for their illegal protests against nuclear weapons. They had put their commitment to much better use than Blake had. They had campaigned openly for a peaceful world. They were shocked at Blake’s sentence and helped ...”

“... jobs. What about those ‘illegals’? Are they not, as everyone from Pat Buchanan in the US to Michael Howard in Britain keeps telling us, mere human refuse: a menace to civilised society? On the contrary, they do the dirty work which makes the civilised comfort of Buchanan and Howard possible. Society gets their contribution cheap. In the most ...”

“... own point of view very plainly, but he was also more interesting and cagier than that. Reviewing Michael Foot’s Debts of Honour he describes an occasion when he was working for Tribune and Foot was in charge. He’d written a piece about race relations that criticised two Labour MPs for their unsatisfactory ...”

“... plot summaries​ for Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave refer to a man being found dead at the foot of a mountain. This is correct, but it isn’t quite what it looks like on screen. There’s a body, a police team is investigating, and we are in a mountainous area. But the rock the man fell or was pushed from looks like a theme park invention. This effect ...”

“... is an ongoing success story. Human beings, it seems, are all right. We may shoot ourselves in the foot, other people in the head, crash cars and planes, ruin the environment and have a bad habit of turning conflicts of interest into vast cash bonuses, but natural selection works, or at least works better than reason and technology and cultural history want us ...”

“... more stunned for days afterwards, or occasional years when thistles on the pampas grow to ten foot, so densely that firebreaks have to be cut by dragging the carcasses of animals through them. A Marquez-like figure called ‘the Hermit’ enters the first chapter: he wears an overcoat a foot thick, lined with fragments ...”

“... a vivid picture of the man whose character and career epitomise the post-war triumphs of MI5: Michael Bettaney. Poor Bettaney was off his rocker from an early age. Though he was clever enough to go to Oxford University, he could not contain his twin obsessions: Adolf Hitler and alcohol. Observers in Oxford pubs would ask him to be quiet when he clicked ...”

“... which keeps the moguls in perspective and calls them to account: Charles Raw on Jim Slater, Michael Gillard on Rossminter, Tom Bower on Tiny Rowland, Christopher Hird on Rupert Murdoch. But the long shadow of Thatcher and her mandarins still shuts out the ...”

“... end up as an oligopoly.’ Souter even criticises right-wing Tories like Ridley, Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo for complaining about his oligopoly. Wolmar dutifully describes this argument as ‘sophisticated’. It does, however, seem a little churlish of Souter to criticise Tory ministers when they handed so many public assets to him on a plate, and his ...”

“... far more to do with the rise in VAT on fuel, Norman Lamont’s Exchange Rate Mechanism fiasco, and Michael Heseltine’s pit closures than with any decision of a Labour Party Special Conference. The evidence suggests that large numbers of people who voted Tory in 1992 were persuaded very soon that they had made a hideous mistake. These people would have voted ...”

“... that, in return, doctors would support the NHS. Bevan agreed, and an amending Act was drawn up. Michael Foot, in his recently republished biography of Bevan, concludes that ‘the Minister and the president of the Royal College of Physicians established an accord.’ It was an accord that split the profession (the BMA accused the College of ...”