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“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish ...”

“... particularly on chat shows – got wilder and longer so that one had the nauseating spectacle of David Frost, for instance, standing supposedly touched and surprised by the audience’s unexpected warmth, the shouts of the PAs now become whoops. This quickly became standard and a customary feature of live shows today, particularly Graham Norton’s, with the ...”

“... the greenhouse effect on earth. At the prompting of a geochemist and oceanographer called Charles David Keeling, the observatory of Mauna Loa on Hawaii had been collecting data on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1959. The result – the ‘Keeling curve’ – clearly showed that levels of atmospheric CO2 were rising sharply. In 1979, Jimmy Carter ...”

“... any Scots from the indictment (though – unkindest cut – he does exonerate one Welshman, David Jones). Worse still for Crawford, Kenner announces, ‘There’s no longer an English literature’: by which he means that, whereas ‘talent has not been lacking’ – on the contrary, ‘good poets are dispersed round the land’ and each has a personal ...”

“... God, don’t ask me to do that – I wouldn’t be able to say no.”’ He doesn’t. The Cameron Tories were really, it seems, as cliquish, self-important and devoid of ‘the idea/policy/ vision thing’ as they looked. There is no sense of what Swire describes as the ‘guff about rights without duty’ with which Gove rounded off his speech in the ...”

“... style cited by Thomas Grant, two seem to me to hit the mark. The future Justice Edwin Cameron, watching Kentridge’s defence in the trial of the dean of Johannesburg under the Terrorism Act, witnessed a cross-examination that was ‘meticulously detailed, but mesmerising’ – a combination far more difficult to achieve than it sounds. Many ...”

“... a majority in the Parliament in 2011; the mobilising effects of the independence referendum; David Cameron’s decision (presumably well prepared) to use the result as an excuse to push for ‘English votes for English measures’, which allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. From that moment, as Scottish MPs knew, Labour was ...”

“... by the cack-handedness of the Better Together campaign as they were. Brown repeatedly warned Cameron and Osborne that Project Fear wouldn’t work, and that only Project Supplication (in the form of a promise to devolve more powers, finally made in the week before the vote) would salvage the situation. He was right. The proof came two years later, when ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... or go missing. Bowen did not settle in North Cork until the spring of 1952, when her husband, Alan Cameron, retired. A couple of months later, Alan died in his sleep. Unable to maintain the estate on her own, she sold up in 1959. The weird households had seeded themselves a long time before that in the childhood cleft between heredity and environment.Few ...”

“... Shelburne’s new government, which itself imploded in the spring of 1783. As in 2010, when the Cameron-Clegg coalition was formed, it was the arithmetic in the House of Commons that largely dictated the options available. In 1783, Fox had 90 followers, Lord North 120 and Lord Shelburne 140, with a walk-on cast of unaligned backwoodsmen among the rest of ...”

“... rather than padlock themselves to the gates of Downing Street. Strangest of all, in September 2015 David Cameron wrote to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about cuts it had recently announced: I was disappointed at the long list of suggestions floated in the briefing note to make up significant cuts to frontline services ...”

“... UKIP MEPs to Brussels.) If we strip out those 59 seats from the 2010 Parliament, we are left with David Cameron’s Tories having an outright majority, and no need for coalition government. If we move backwards through history, it’s unusual for the Scottish electorate to be such a decisive shaping force for the composition of Parliament: Thatcher would ...”

“... Hallam, Macaulay, Stubbs, Maitland and Dicey, and by multitudes of lesser authors such as David Lindsay Keir, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. Keir’s workmanlike Constitutional History of Modern Britain since 1485 went through nine editions between 1938 and 1969, and was both a celebration of how government in the UK was ‘conducted by ...”