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“... death in the Birmingham pub bombing gives ballast to Coe’s seriocomic survey of 1970s Britain. Benjamin, a would-be writer, is a dreamy, passive boy who feels ‘destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs’. His schoolfriends – Philip, a conscientious plodder; Doug, a worldly left-wing wit; Harding, an anarchic practical ...”

“... worry, the menfolk are keeping Arlene right. Challenging David Davis to ‘stand up to the EU’, Ian Paisley Jr declared in the House of Commons that ‘It’s about time the government displayed a no surrender attitude – stand up to them, man!’ Sammy Wilson, the DUP member for East Antrim, agreed and spoke of taking the gloves off in the fight with the ...”

“... contemporary biology should be able to follow her. Especially successful is her account of the way Ian Wilmut and his co-worker Keith Campbell managed to trick nuclei from differentiated cells into behaving like their embryonic counterparts. The biochemical constitution of a cell varies throughout the cycle, and there is a phase in which the cell ...”

“... look into the case. To begin with, I spent much time, along with the World in Action journalists Ian McBride and Charles Tremayne, trying to find a police officer involved in the case who would tell a story different from the one told in court. The search proved fruitless. Next we got two independent forensic scientists to test Skuse’s evidence. They ...”

“... suicide or an accident.There’s also the question of what he was called. Before settling on Ian Robert Maxwell he had repeatedly changed his name according to the political needs of the moment. Born Abraham Leib Hoch into a Yiddish-speaking community in the town of Solotvino, then in Czechoslovakia and today in Ukraine, he had used ten different names ...”

“... which made the new state more alien still to Northern Protestants. What had been separated by Britain was further divided by Irishmen largely unconscious of the significance of their acts. One other factor helped to make the political division more lasting than it might have been: the South remained neutral in the Second World War, fearful lest ...”

“... electricity shortages. The electricity industry consumed three-quarters of the coal mined in Britain, and its re-organisation had a special appeal as the means to crush the NUM – particularly in the wake of Thatcher’s own showdown with the miners. This, as Steve Jones points out in one of the essays here, is what the Government had in mind when ...”

“... the union ladder and, by the age of 35, had become president of the largest mineworkers’ area in Britain. Yorkshire had already, and in a very short space of time, ceased to be a right-wing – which is to say, anti-Communist – redoubt, an achievement due in large measure to the efforts of the Communist Party, which in 1950 had placed the Canadian ...”

“... is divided almost as surely from its continental neighbours, by the spine of the Andes, as is Britain by the Channel. The outlook is maritime: the principal industry is, or was, mining. Gabriel García Márquez once described Chile as ‘a cornice of the Andes in a misty sea’. One could push this too far, no doubt (the sheer quality of Chilean wine ...”

“... old-fashioned ideas on the upbringing of children and a deep scorn for the railway network. The Britain she governs bears a plausible relation to the Britain we live in now. It is a soulless place. Notions of public welfare have succumbed to the dominant culture of enterprise and profit. Public services barely ...”

“... step the exercise will have been a hollow one.’ We learn that the poor are better housed in Britain than in France, but we are less generous to larger families. Therefore in Britain the family allowance should be increased and in France they should do something about housing. There would then, presumably, be greater ...”

“... had contested the seat unsuccessfully in 2010, turned the 14,671 majority his Labour predecessor, Ian Davidson, had won in that election into a 9950 majority of his own, a swing of 35.2 per cent. There were similarly large swings in the other Glasgow constituencies. The SNP had transformed referendum defeat into general election triumph, and a permanent ...”

“... and removed his quotation from ‘the sex-and-violence literature’ of James Hadley Chase and Ian Fleming: he substituted writing of his own, not guying these offensive writers, but carefully imitating them, in pastiches which few recognised to be imitation – since Hoggart’s point was, partly, that such writers have power and skill. Hoggart is an ...”

“... and poetries, from Black Mountain and Objectivism to Yvor Winters and the ‘plain style’. In Britain he is more likely to be known as a deviant Movement figure, author of such books as Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, and as a poet who, while initially espousing Movement plainness, refused to meet his readers halfway (halfway was ...”

“... and former literary editor of the Spectator), there is now no literary reviewing worth the name in Britain: The days have vanished when reviewing was a ‘serious’ matter. The articles in the Sunday papers are far too short to be able to do justice to a book. The New Statesman has collapsed, so has the Times Literary Supplement. Very occasionally one gets a ...”