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“... a mouse, Is Michael Foot, who now speaks for the nation In this alleged Hour of Humiliation. Lord Carrington presents the dazed PM With his own head upon a point of honour. The nitwit Nott stays at his post pro tem Though in the long term he must be a goner. Poor Thatcher makes a mighty show of phlegm At all the bad luck that’s been heaped upon ...”

“... away To show the thick foundation wanly glowing, Cracked by his smile of disbelief at meeting Lord Hailsham dressed for the official greeting. If Reagan’s jet-black hair seems slightly strange, What about Hailsham’s wig, sword, socks and cape? The President when dressed to ride the range Looks weird, but not as if he’s going ape. For Reagan it ...”

“... people free. Perhaps a phantom quest’s the one sane goal – As now the Sun claims to have found Lord Lucan In deepest jungle with tapir and toucan. The Jungle Fugitive’s a Fleet Street thriller That Martin Bormann starred in last time round. Embezzler on the lam and missing killer Swathed in lianas are abruptly found. One day no doubt they’ll bump into ...”

“... allies in the City establishment, but it is striking that when he received a knighthood in 1966, Lord Cromer, the governor of the Bank, opposed the honour on the specious grounds that while Warburg might have been ‘very successful in his own affairs’, he had not made ‘any outstanding contribution to the common weal of the City’. In his last decade ...”

“... the first female home secretary in 2007, but has not been a member of Parliament since 2010. James Timpson, the new minister for prisons, ran the high street cobblers of the same name, which is known for employing ex-offenders. Less well known are David Hanson, minister of state in the Home Office, who was MP for Delyn in North Wales for 27 years and ...”

“... with the wrong date, she tells us that the crowd blocked all the entrances to Parliament while Lord George Gordon stormed into the Commons. The MPs fell silent at his entrance and sat spellbound as he harangued them on the evils of popery. He then rushed out to do the same in the Lords. In between speaking he ran to the window to shout at the crowd ...”

“... and then on to cabinet rank, first as Secretary of Defence under Heath, and then as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Foreign Secretary. Then came Margaret Thatcher’s consolidation of her own style of party leadership and, on 14 September 1981, the end of his political progress. There were clear intellectual as well as tactical, sociological and ...”

“... Annan’, the ‘gifted intellectual historian’, in uneasy collaboration with ‘Lord Annan’, the ‘well-known public figure’. He rather admired those sections of the book written (as he saw it) by ‘Noel Annan’, with their acute analysis of changing intellectual fashions and their insider perspective on almost a century of academic ...”

“... it was exhibited at Windsor.) There were also some alarming attempts at cross-breeding. In 1773, Lord Robert Clive was determined that his zebra mare should mate with an ass. The zebra ‘shewed great disgust’ but Clive persevered: the ass was painted with stripes, ‘whereupon she accepted him’. (The mule that resulted from this union was said to be ...”

“... as part of a series that included Seamus Deane, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Stewart Parker, James Simmons, and several other Northern Irish poets whose voices were beginning to raise themselves in the mid-Sixties. To hear John Carey now, almost a quarter of a century later, go farther still along that road of praise is consequently all the more ...”

“... II of France declared her not only queen of Scots (as she had been since the death of her father, James V, when she was six days old), but queen of England and Ireland too. The show includes a sketch of Mary’s ‘false arms’ – French, Scottish and English arms displayed together on a single shield – that Throckmorton sent from France to Elizabeth’s ...”

“... to form a picture – not always in the best possible taste. Mark Girouard’s biography of James Stirling is constructed by a similar procedure, an astonishing accumulation of small details, asides and memories building up to a portrait. Big Jim is vividly told and convincingly three-dimensional. And it isn’t always in very good taste. Yet despite ...”

“... primarily as a character in someone else’s story. Ever since Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, in which she appears as a lonely spinster with an ear trumpet and an unrequited passion for her fellow novelist, speculation over the closeness of her friendship with James and the motives for her suicide has dominated ...”

“... by expanding the sports coverage, introducing women’s pages and focusing on high-profile trials. James Canham Read was hanged for the murder of Florence Dennis, having slept with both her and her sister. His last words, according to the Evening News, were ‘Will it hurt?’ This was perhaps a question to which the answer was ‘Yes’. In retrospect, all ...”

“... a ‘makar’. A century later in his how-to-be-a-king book, the Basilikon Doron, the versifying James VI of Scotland claimed that he had ‘not spared to play the bairde against all the estaitis of my kingdome’. When James boarded the English throne in 1603, his Scots had to be translated for English readers to whom the ...”