“... hubris and the machinations of his enemies. Brivati’s previous books include The End of Decline: Blair and Brown in Power, as well as biographies of the Labour Party eminences Lord Goodman and Hugh Gaitskell. He met Naqvi’s family just after his arrest in London. The pivot of the book is Abraaj’s planned sale of Karachi Electric to a Chinese ...”

“... up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the Colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag.’ Across a never relenting stream of traffic, motorbikes cascading from ...”

“... enthusiasms of a slightly older painter friend called Tom Phillips: the mind-expanding work of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew was followed by Morton Feldman and La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Phillips also alerted Eno to the untapped potential of tape recorders, and impressed him with a lecture using random cards and slides.All these things ...”

“... as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale ...”

“... advocacy organisation. In 1965 she helped open the world’s first school for autistic children (John Lennon was a major donor). She wrote the first, and still definitive, guide for parents of autistic children. But she is best remembered for the term she coined in 1981, in the journal Psychological Science: Asperger’s syndrome. As she acknowledged much ...”

“... of the mujahideen seriously,’ the speaker continues. ‘Do not listen to the liars Bush and Blair who say that al-Qaida is finished. We are not spokespersons for al-Qaida but we pray in the same direction.’ I notice, at the back of the hall, two men in suits who are not journalists, though one of them holds a notebook. They listen attentively. An ...”

“... like Kenyatta; he preached national unity (as they all did). One who hoped much from him was John Githongo, the hero of Wrong’s fascinating, richly researched and important new book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower. Githongo believed Kibaki when he proclaimed an end to corruption, and became his right-hand man in the task of ...”

“... 1946, only to be expelled by a reactionary faculty – he had dared to prefer Cézanne to Augustus John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the ...”

“... Joseph Ellis should now venture an answer to this question, having already produced biographies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as well as a book about the 1790s, Founding Brothers, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Like many Americans, George Washington took arms against Britain in 1775 resignedly. He was 43, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and a ...”

“... a radical bookshop and publisher in North London, Johnson met the Trinidadian poet and activist John La Rose, who became his mentor. He was also introduced to Caribbean intellectuals including Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon.With Selvon’s encouragement, Johnson abandoned his attempts to write poetry in standard English and began experimenting ...”

“... cities’. Other socialists, including his fellow Scots and near contemporaries Tom Johnston and John Wheatley, worked as MacDonald did as journalists or publishers, but tended to be involved in campaigning publications, Johnston as the editor of the socialist weekly Forward and Wheatley as the writer and publisher of socialist books. While he conceived of ...”

“... invariably demeaned by its occupant. Sixty years ago this month, the then Tory Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, chose to announce a new Public Order Bill in the course of an offensive and thoroughly partisan speech at Cleckheaton Town Hall which just happened to be delivered in the same week in which Labour’s annual conference was taking place. The effect of ...”

“... agenda tied to its tail, one which was destructive of social solidarities, while the right-wing John Redwood objected that it came veined with social-democratic notions which discouraged governments like Britain’s from making up their minds to be independent nation states in charge of their own economy and their own politics. The different styles of ...”

“... covering the case of a teenage boy who had been beaten up by a policeman in Thurso, which is near John o’Groats. There was the most fearful hullabaloo based on the belief that this sort of thing could only happen in the wilderness of the Far North. The press demanded that this errant policeman be brought to justice. There was a similar furore a year or two ...”

“... of political science in That Noble Science of Politics (1983), cowritten with his late colleagues John Burrow and Donald Winch, which rejected the notion that a unidirectional, single-subject narrative was an adequate way of recounting a discipline’s history. The authors instead immersed themselves in unresolved contradictions: between deductive procedures ...”