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“... concerned with) while remaining ‘progressive’ and egalitarian in matters further outside his ken. I don’t have to declare my interest, for Lucas has declared it for me: his essay in the Annual is called ‘Hardy, Donald Davie, England and the English’ – a subject certainly more wide-ranging than ‘the theme of rain in Hardy’s verse’. What he ...”

“... and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as a time of diversity and imaginative enterprise. One poet who appears in neither book, and who surely exemplifies not only the ...”

“... and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a ...”

“... no longer cope with looking after him.) He was not addicted to gesture politics in the way that Ken Livingstone was in London, but he was still a standard-bearer of the municipal loony left. In those days the power in the Labour Party was with the Bennites, who had largely taken it over at the constituency level; so Blunkett was, faute de mieux, a Bennite ...”

“... internal culture, though its misfiring launch suggests something of the difficulty. Nita Clarke, whom he appointed to oversee the process, was revealed as an enthusiastic digital partisan of the party’s right and was gone within 24 hours.Few of these stories are entirely new or surprising, but gathered in one place they soon become ...”

“... the screws. The first attempt to introduce market competition into the NHS was made by Kenneth Clarke in 1990, in the dying months of Thatcher’s rule. The ‘internal market’ was rushed in, ignoring the views of the medical profession. It didn’t work. Tony Blair’s first health minister, Frank Dobson, read its funeral rites when Labour came to power ...”

“... she aimed; in which she was principally at home. She liked – to borrow a phrase from St John Clarke, to ‘try conclusions with the maelstrom’. There are echoes of Proust in certain characters in Powell. Uncle Giles’s description of himself as ‘a bit of a radical’ is a repetition of the claim Legrandin awards himself; Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson’s ...”