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“... the post-reshuffle settlement is another matter. The problems of Patricia Hewitt and Charles Clarke are more serious and have been made serious largely by the prime minister. Patricia Hewitt has not been a rebellious minister but she had the courage to vote according to conviction over public smoking, and her remark that the NHS had had its best year ...”

“... a lot together. Oliver Letwin, with his decency and his wonderful professorial quality. Ken Clarke. Definitely Ken Clarke. He is truly brilliant … I am really looking forward to the election campaign. We have something important to say, and now I just want to get out there and say it. It would be touching if it ...”

“... to bring back the 1960s, this is at any rate not so deeply atavistic as the other parties. Under Michael Foot, Labour would clearly like to bring back the 1940s, and the author of that meretricious tract Guilty Men is for ever trying to speak for England and to tell the Prime Minister that she must, in the name of God, go. The Tories, meanwhile, have openly ...”

“... The warriors are Paul (Delroy Lindo), Eddie (Norm Lewis), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr) and Otis (Clarke Peters). Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) has belatedly joined them. They have been trekking through the jungle for a day or two and (with the exception of David) aren’t as young as they were. Tempers fray, the men pick on each other’s weaknesses ...”

“... as the result of outright negligence by the owners. In 1967 nine miners were killed in a fire at Michael colliery in Scotland. The detailed inquiry which followed blamed the deaths on the poisonous fumes from polyurethane foam which had lined the roofs and walls underground. The National Coal Board promptly banned polyurethane foam from its pits, and sent ...”

“... or torture. At the Appeal, however, there was a mass of new evidence. Former Constable Tom Clarke said he had seen guns being pointed at the prisoners in Queen’s Road Police Station, Birmingham. He said that a dog had been used to threaten one of the men in the cells; and that the men were bruised and cut before they were taken to prison. All this ...”

“... achieved over the last quarter-century with little thanks to his ostensible political opponents. Michael Foot and his dog Dizzy can stand as a tableau testifying to the magnanimity (or credulity) with which the old magic is perpetuated among political romantics of all persuasions. No, what scotched the Disraelian legend as serious history was the standard ...”

“... to keep a tight rein on her three daughters. Adaline’s moral code was worked out in what Michael Holroyd in his introduction memorably terms the ‘moral gymnasium’ of the last Victorian decades. He characterises it, too harshly, as a culture of ‘conceit and condemnation … complacency and fear of change’, but it was a period when conventions ...”

“... serious agreement with Mark Steyn on the threat of the Muslim hordes; guffawing at Jeremy Clarke on stupid nurses – and would dismiss anyone who disagreed with them as either deluded or a politically correct killjoy. To their credit, Lowe and McArthur don’t have an entry on ‘political correctness’, though it features in what they have to say ...”

“... necessary to consider his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of ...”

“... learn that several of Vidal’s hours here have been spent discussing Montaigne (so he said) with Michael Foot. Sadly, when Vidal showed up on one of Newsnight’s election panels, Jeremy Paxman failed to cut him down to size. In fact, he didn’t even try. Vidal was allowed to preen himself at leisure. Next to him, the two British panellists – Lord Archer ...”

“... since Labour began electing ‘leaders’) never to have held a ministerial post – being PPS to Michael Foot for a year does not count. He is the only British party leader to have been an EU Commissioner – and is likely to remain so. As a result his record in ‘government’ is hard to judge, since what the Commissioners do (unless it is thought to be ...”

“... The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards ...”

“... than in most Western countries; his translations include, for instance, two SF novels by Arthur C. Clarke. Even more valuable than his cash earnings, however, were the attendant perks of the job. Apart from the right to buy scarce or otherwise unobtainable goods in special shops open only to the Party’s nomenklatura appointees, the privileges that would have ...”

“... but unsuccessful; they left him roundly defeated for the leadership but narrowly elected as Michael Foot’s deputy by the end of 1981. ‘I felt myself compelled to agree with Michael in public on all issues at all times,’ Healey admits. It was hardly a happy position; and a less robust and pragmatic man might have ...”