“... aftermath, MacDonald, accompanied by Philip Snowden, chancellor in both Labour governments, and J.H. Thomas, colonial secretary in 1924, joined the National Government dominated by the Conservatives. After that, the shortcomings of the 1924 government came to be regarded as a rehearsal for the more profound betrayal of 1931. The Labour government elected in ...”

“... In the immediate aftermath of the report’s publication, the Napoleonic posture of Alastair Campbell, proclaiming his integrity from some sort of throne against a grand imperial backdrop, contrasted with the BBC employees’ mobbing of their departing director general to give us the two images with which Hutton will now always be associated. It is ...”

“... did not save Garry Flitcroft, but it did, not long afterwards, come to the aid of the model Naomi Campbell, who had been demeaningly doorstepped when the press got wind of the fact that she was being treated for a drug dependency she had publicly denied. Although the House of Lords was split on whether what had happened to her entitled her to a remedy, they ...”

“... half-lemur, and wearing a kind of grubby Tyrolean jacket, poses between Tom Driberg and Stephen Spender. There is a kind of innocence about it, the pastoralism which only the past can imitate. Spender, looking like a kindly young schoolmaster, clearly had more to do with the solid success of Horizon than his modest account to Michael Shelden would ...”

“... just joined them.’ ‘Robin, at that moment in the cottage near Skipton, was eating dinner with Stephen.’ Surely the art of narration ought to be a little less blatant than this? Since the novelist can hardly simulate the essentially voyeuristic pleasure of the Dallas cut – when we observe with our own eyes the switch from the legitimate domicile to the ...”

“... otherwise be the justification of the life. Spalding dramatises the break between the taste of the Stephen children and the Stephen parents by describing the fall from favour of G.F. Watts. He was a family connection – his portraits of Sir Leslie and Julia Stephen found their way to ...”

“... to obtain their statements, just as they had to secure the confession of one of the Cardiff Three, Stephen Miller.Even when police officers are successfully prosecuted, the convictions they were involved in often remain unexamined. Since 2018 the Court of Appeal has quashed convictions in a string of cases involving Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell of the ...”

“... The United Kingdom is a good place in which to assemble a book of sceptical essays about human rights, but was 2001 a good year in which to do it? True, by then Scotland and Wales had operative devolution statutes which obliged their Governments to observe the European Convention on Human Rights in all they did; and some interesting decisions had already been thrown up north of the border ...”

“... the blurb stresses, ‘he comes home again and again.’ Linguistically more adventurous is George Campbell Hay’s Seeker, Reaper, a single poem in English, Scots and Gaelic, which is republished in attractively collectable format as a celebration of Hay’s native place – Tarbert, Loch Fyne. William McIlvanney, an accomplished novelist, is another Scottish ...”

“... Kingsley Amis seemed shrewdly chosen to forestall the ‘Lord Archer wins the lottery’, ‘lucky Stephen King’, or ‘not more cash for Martin’ reactions. Conservative values and Good English (virtues that Sir Kingsley and the Times share) would be the prime beneficiaries of the shattered book agreement. Inside, the op-ed page was dominated by a gloating ...”

“... city is set against the closed world of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Conrad shows O’Henry and Stephen Crane plucking characters from the crowd; Jacob Riis using photography to document the inhumanities of slum tenements, Stieglitz using it to make skyscrapers monumental; Oldenburg embracing the city by making toys out of monuments, and monuments out of ...”

“... In 1886 there was an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of the work of John Everett Millais (Sir John, in fact: he had recently been made a baronet). There were pictures from his Pre-Raphaelite infancy, like Isabella and Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop; anecdotal ones, like My First Sermon (a child portrait in the Bubbles line); landscapes (Chill October); pictures with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana ...”

“... and bobbed hair, and I simply can’t bring myself to do that.’ He found his best friend in Stephen Tennant, who, Rex thought, overdid the make-up later in life. ‘We’ve got rather a “case”,’ he wrote at the time – the Haileybury term for a love affair between boys. Twelve years later he added: ‘thank God it grew and lasted all this ...”

“... of the gab. At a time when Dublin audiences were content to see ‘Mde Rejane in Ibsen, Mrs P. Campbell in Sudermann, Olga Netherstole in Sapho, etc’, as he told Stephen MacKenna, Synge wanted to interest them in unsqueamish plays of rural life, visions of the Aran Islands, the sexual loneliness, the provenance of fear ...”

“... of the media managers. When the Northern Ireland negotiations got serious Tony Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current ...”