“... The government​ is making it harder to vote. As of 4 May, when local elections take place in some parts of England, and in all British elections after that, everyone who votes at a polling station will have to show photographic proof that they are who they say they are. Some have made the comparison with voter suppression in the US, where Republicans impose onerous ID requirements to keep the vote down among those least likely to have suitable documents – namely the poor, who are assumed to lean Democrat ...”

“... in what were, for Lincolnshire, a strange few weeks in 2007. In a bloodless localist uprising in May, Boston’s mainstream parties were voted out of office by a single-issue movement demanding a new bypass. The Boston Bypass Independents won 25 out of 32 seats at the local elections, wiping out Labour, which lost 11 seats, and leaving the Conservatives with ...”

“... died. His name is above the title: in yellow print, superimposed over the famous (and uncredited) David Bailey portrait, the Sixties icon that makes the Twins look like two portions of Robert Maxwell, split by an axe. The Krays allowed Pearson the status of a nightclub photographer with a flash in his fist. He was supposed to offer his contribution to their ...”

“... preposterous contraption of regeneration, whereby at moments of dire depletion, the Doctor may collapse, shimmer a bit and re-emerge shortly afterwards, in the body and person of someone new. Audience figures were nothing special to begin with. But it turned out that the show’s young producer, Verity Lambert, had ignored her boss’s instructions ...”

“... of objectionable material. A Senate subcommittee put publishers on the stand: ‘Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?’ Fifteen comics companies went out of business in the summer of 1954 alone.Generations of fans have had ...”

“... lies rather in his sly portrayal of the squad’s commanding officer as Napoleon. As the historian David Todd has argued, this foreign policy disaster exposed the hollowness of the emperor’s promises to promote the trade and influence of France throughout the world. After Napoleon’s overthrow in 1870 and death in exile at Chislehurst in Kent, the fate of ...”

“... the evidence of the ‘federalising’ effect. Scotland is clearly drifting away from England, as David Runciman suggested in the last issue of the LRB, making it increasingly hard to speak confidently of ‘British’ politics. But it is not drifting towards independence. On the contrary, the main beneficiary of the drift is Labour, a devolutionist party ...”

“... his break with it, when it came, would be just as uncompromising. Whatever revolutionary ideals he may once have harboured were snuffed out as the 1970s dragged on and he grew distant from what he characterised as the ‘furtive mandarin Leninism’ at the New Left Review. He didn’t believe that theories based on the primacy of class and capital could ...”

“... uses and meanings, of course, and we might say the more the better. The lives we imagine for crime may help us to see in it and around it, and thinking about crime may help us to think about other matters. Still, we need a way of managing the profusion, and I am going to suggest three major meanings or reference points for ...”

“... On 23 May 1949, Lionel Gamlin, producer of the Light Programme’s Hello Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and publishing world for some time – I and my stories are completely banned by the BBC as far as children are concerned ...”

“... with the most hard-line reverting to attitudes current in 1969. The success of Sinn Féin in the May elections added fuel to the fire, while the death of Elizabeth II and the recent census result, showing a Catholic majority in the North, are sure to increase unease.But loyalism has never been just one thing, and in Northern Protestants Susan McKay finds ...”

“... in for Aglietta’s absent sovereign power. On every occasion that panic came to a head – in May and November 2010 with the Greek and Irish bailouts; summer 2011 with tremors over Spanish and Italian bonds; November and December 2011 with the ousting of Papandreou and Berlusconi, followed by Cameron’s veto of the Fiscal Compact treaty; and summer 2012 ...”

“... slip the content straight down the reader’s throat, for content is what matters most. This may beg a lot more questions, but except to critics it is clear enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then ...”

“... thereanent.’ Lear’s nonsense is full of mistakes that both the characters and their creator may or may not want to make, and Jenny Uglow’s absorbing new biography brings to the fore the question of the relation of his creativity to the accidence of his experience. In his diaries Lear often quotes or invokes his ...”

“... nuclear threat. ‘Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic programme in years may be seriously underestimating that situation and the gravity of the threat,’ he claimed. An article in Time Magazine in December asked ‘How soon will Saddam get the bomb?’ It concluded: ‘Not nearly so soon as the Bush Administration claims.’ Stories ...”