“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”

“... Gear, were the only ones among her critics who got her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the head ...”

“... off to Germany, though the trains were intercepted and unloaded by partisans on their journey north. Ferrari, ever the pragmatist, turned a blind eye when the partisans among his workforce used his warehouses at night to repair their weapons and craft sabotage devices. He also gave sanctuary to an injured partisan fighter and (separately) a Jewish ...”

“... I ran away.’ I was never able to, and never even considered it. One day my mother announced that John Gielgud was coming to Cairo to perform Hamlet at the Opera House. ‘We must go,’ she said with infectious resolve, and indeed the visit was duly set up, although of course I had no idea who John Gielgud was. I was nine ...”

“... engine types, guidance systems and fuel consumption. In 1950, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had explained the inevitability of federation in terms that every adult Eritrean can retrieve, more or less correctly, from somewhere in the mental files: ‘From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive ...”

“... years later, boosted by intermarriage with the offspring of marauding Muslim adventurers from the North. It was completed two centuries before the Mughals arrived. The head of the clan had the right to keep ten thousand men under arms. By the mid 19th century the family had become a laboratory example of a decaying aristocracy quarrelling over ...”

“... founded by a mathematician, James Simons, and based in East Setauket on Long Island’s affluent north shore, is reported to charge investors in its Medallion Fund a 5 per cent management fee and a 44 per cent performance fee, though I haven’t been able to confirm those figures. To stop the performance fee from being an incentive to take wild punts, hedge ...”

“... rejection of the thrust of the act would have turned the judges in the UK into activists on the North American model and it was soon seen off by Lord Steyn’s colleagues; the then senior law lord, Lord Bingham, indirectly castigated it in the course of one judgment as ‘judicial vandalism’. After a few false starts the courts eventually hit on a fairly ...”

“... former undercover officer Peter Francis, who spied on minor anti-fascist and anti-racist groups in North London in the early 1990s before infiltrating his target group, Anti-Fascist Action. While undercover, he lived alone in Highbury, drove a van and got a day job working in a school for children with special needs. (His new friends thought he was the school ...”

“... cartoon, but before he could finish what sounded uncannily like the solicitor’s speech in John Osborne’s play Inadmissible Evidence, a year or so later, Doris grabbed my sleeve and we escaped down the winding wooden staircase, with the sound of his voice echoing behind us. In addition, my mother had one of her screaming fits and threatened to sue ...”

“... of private greed, vested interest corruption and class favouritism that were levelled against North, Pitt, Sidmouth and Wellington, as well as John Major, Neil Hamilton and Alan B’Stard, and that did most to destroy the Tory regime in 1830 and again in 1997.The new trade border in the Irish Sea may well prove ...”

“... in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who travelled around the American South recording folk musicians.) ‘The singer of tales,’ Parry later wrote, ‘has no pen and ink to let him slowly work out a novel way of recounting novel actions, but must make up his tale without ...”

“... of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that life, and life only, is the clue to the ...”

“... she’d spent the last nine months telling us it wasn’t going to happen – immediately wiped North Korea from the headlines, and returned the spotlight to another, more drawn-out existential crisis: the one currently being endured by the Labour Party.What makes Jeremy Corbyn a complex political figure, rather in spite of himself, is that he is both too ...”