“... Mrs Thatcher’s key personal adviser during the miners’ strike whose activities so enraged Ned Smith, the experienced and thoroughly decent Personnel Officer of the Coal Board, and his colleague, the late Geoffrey Kirk, both of whom strove for honourable solutions. At key moments in the strike, Hart boasted, he advised Mrs Thatcher that settlement of the ...”

“... themselves to their typewriters each afternoon, and again after they had finished their labours. Michael Foot would become the paper’s principal political columnist, and there would be generous severance pay for staff members who found these changes unacceptable. In the event the company lawyers made no mistake, and when Lord Beaverbrook died the ...”

“... about Covid-19, the less you should trust them.’ The author, Bristol epidemiologist George Davey Smith, argued that there are ‘many rational people with scientific credentials making assertive public pronouncements on Covid-19 who seem to suggest there can be no legitimate grounds for disagreeing with them’. He had a point. Even those trained in relevant ...”

“... on episodes of Z Cars, found allies in the Wednesday Play’s script editor and producer, Roger Smith and Tony Garnett. ‘What we realised,’ Loach said, ‘was that social democrats and Labour politicians were simply acting on behalf of the ruling class, protecting the interests of capital.’ No sooner had he identified a politically receptive audience ...”

“... up years ago – and because of it too: the pace of change has picked up since then. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sometimes talks about the importance of tourism to New York as if tourists were more important to the city than its inhabitants, but when you consider that 44 million tourists visited the city last year – an increase of 25 per cent since 2001 ...”

“... of a leadership election among Conservative MPs in which she secured more votes than her rival Michael Heseltine but not quite enough to prevent the contest going to a second round. At that point her cabinet collectively turned against her and let her know that she needed to step down for their sake. They couched it as a plea to save the party from ...”

“... she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ‘invaluable help, talent and patience’. You certainly don’t hear the Cherie described by Michael Levy, ‘every bit the get-ahead barrister’, who on their ...”

“... effect, only two theories of evolution have ever been put forward,’ writes John Maynard Smith, ‘one, originating with Lamarck ... the other originating with Darwin.’ Such reduction of the scientific corpus to patterns of mutual exclusivity doubtless tells us something about the strategy, if not the logic, of scientific corroboration. It is a ...”

“... MacNeice, Dillon, Cleverdon and Bridson, and new ones like W. R. Rodgers, Terence Tiller, R. D. Smith and Rayner Heppenstall. MacNeice was henceforth one of a group of literary men whose social life revolved around certain pubs in Soho, Fitzrovia or the immediate environs of Broadcasting House. Dylan Thomas was much in use as an actor and a voice as well as ...”

“... Links remain, however. The junior officers of 1990 run the army of 2022. General Mark Carleton-Smith, the current chief of the general staff, passed out of Sandhurst in 1986. Sales’s assessment is revealing of a culture that requires rigidity in order to function amid the terror, fatigue and confusion of war, but as a consequence often ignores criticism ...”

“... to look at the series of British actions leading up to the massacre, in particular those of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab. Unlike Dyer, O’Dwyer could not be said to be a stupid man; he had a first in jurisprudence from Balliol. But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames ...”

“... successfully did in 1931. The question is, who comes closest to Baldwin? In some ways, it is Michael Ancram, a traditional figure who could probably hold the Party together better than the other candidates. But, unlike Baldwin, he represents the Party’s past rather than its future. The obvious answer is Ken Clarke. He had the support of the Party ...”

“... life, real wisdom, and the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments On 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases, especially carbon ...”

“... filming in Ilkley. Nothing untoward occurred until the evening, when I was taken out to supper by Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. Came my salad of mixed leaves and there, nestling among the rocket, were several shards of broken glass. ‘Very mixed,’ said Miss Smith. ‘No,’ said the ...”

“... those quotations from Defoe. For most of the past two hundred years, since the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, a serious financial authority (which Defoe was in his time) who suggested that credit markets were ruled basically by irrationality, whimsy and chaos would himself be regarded as suffering from ‘a sort of lunacy’. Yet the events ...”