Search Results

“... The DEA! The Ministry of Technology! The tantrums of George Brown! Later that same day, Crossman dined with ‘Wedgwood Benn’ to discuss the menace of Radio Caroline. There is a decomposing madeleine wedged between every leaf of these diaries, which I have just reread.) In his lenient and chivalrous biography of Crossman, Mr Howard gallantly ...”

“... speaking at an international forum on development in Tibet sponsored by the Chinese government, Neil Davidson, a Labour peer and former advocate general for Scotland, criticised the Western media for bias. The story they had failed to tell, according to Davidson, was that of the remarkable economic development the Chinese government had brought to Tibet in ...”

“... Henry, an 18-year-old doctor’s daughter from Surrey, fell in love with her father’s locum, Neil Micklem. Their affair lasted for years; Jannice hoped it would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter Porter. He was an Australian immigrant in London, and had written a lot of poems, but published ...”

“... in 2019 to inspect a site for the border wall he wished to build, McElroy said: ‘It is a sad day for our country when we trade the majestic, hope-filled symbolism of the Statue of Liberty for an ineffective and grotesque wall, which both displays and inflames the ethnic and cultural divisions that have long been the underside of our national ...”

“... the future of Europe that would challenge the West as well as the East. But Kohl noted that every day two thousand were crossing and not going back, that the East German economy, considered the best available model of the command system, was almost on its knees, that the Monday mobs in Leipzig, not the dreamers of East Berlin, were setting the pace, and that ...”

“... history’, and Foot’s clear culpability in allowing such a crazy document to see the light of day. He is also by a long way too kind about Jill Foot’s appalling misjudgment in encouraging her husband to fight on, thus guaranteeing his personal and political humiliation, and then suggesting, in mid-campaign that he was soon to retire anyway. Finally Foot ...”

“... as a ‘deadly experiment’. Worst of all – at least as judged by the economic rationale of the day – the introduction of free labour and agricultural production had done nothing to ‘improve’ Britain’s wards in Sierra Leone.Much of this criticism was coloured by the Scottish Enlightenment theory of stadial progress, which held that all peoples ...”

“... for Clarence Thomas, narrowly confirmed in 1991 – presaged the hyper-polarisation of the present-day confirmation process.Bork and Thomas, like Scalia, espoused originalism, a reactionary trend in American jurisprudence whose followers try to recover either the original intent of the framers of the late 18th-century constitution or the meaning the document ...”

“... concerned with social justice.’ Proof of this concern came almost at once. On 12 May 1994, the day John Smith died, Andersen Consulting announced that its new director of research was to be Patricia Hewitt, Neil Kinnock’s former press officer and deputy chair of the Party’s Social Justice Commission. The ice-cool ...”

“... by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It reads: Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, 26 September, as he came to ...”

“... worked with an even rarer zeal as a minister for what he saw as the national good. But late in the day – long after the period covered by these diaries – he seems to have realised that the Head was not quite the Arnold he presented himself as, that the prefects were smoking behind the cricket pavilion, that the teachers were trying to seduce the boys, and ...”

“... urged their young supporters to hide their conservative grandparents’ identity cards on election day in order to prevent them from voting. ‘That happens in Spain too,’ another student said (Spain is number 32 on the index). Earlier that summer in Norway (No. 11), Aslaug Haga, the minister for oil and energy, and leader of the Centre Party, resigned ...”

“... for the council in 1970 at the age of 22. Ten years later the young politician had put aside his day job as a teacher and was now leader of Sheffield council, a truly astonishing rise for a man with his disadvantages. Blunkett in power in Sheffield was Blunkett Mark One. He concentrated on his particular concerns of public transport and geriatric care. (A ...”

“... many people including myself, 11 September has long been a date of mourning and rage. On that day in 1973, lethal aircraft flew low over a major city and destroyed a great symbolic building: the Presidential palace in Santiago, known (because it had once been a mint) as La Moneda. Its constitutional occupant, Salvador Allende, could perhaps have bargained ...”

“... John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington.15 March 1994. A reply arrives from John ...”