“... Major was again in the right place, as the only plausible Thatcherite contender who could beat Michael Heseltine. Whether Thatcher really thought him the right man to succeed her was now beside the point, though it became a matter of continuing recrimination. The ambiguity in Major’s position at first helped him. ‘I am not running as son of Margaret ...”

“... the complaint, we are told that the suburb attracted the pragmatic end of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, Manny Shinwell and Peter Mandelson’s mother, Mary, while Hampstead proper attracted ‘more self-consciously intellectual’ politicians such as Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay and Michael Foot. Here is unmasked the ...”

“... A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other fields: Dana, the Irish Eurovision popstar, Michael Cashman, one-time star of EastEnders, as well as sportspersons of various kinds: a Finnish world champion rally driver, an Italian mountaineer, a Spanish Olympic yachting gold medallist. Indeed, probably because they’re elected by a system of PR, people ...”

“... by British ‘critics who considered themselves experts’, Lieutenant-Colonel C. Holmes Wilson drew attention to an altogether more appreciative notice that, by ‘an irony of fate’, had just appeared in the German publication Das Technische Blatt. This confirmed the accuracy of Solomon’s findings, and admitted that the colossal camouflage ...”

“... of sulphate aerosols in Greenland ice cores fell in the 1990s.A British scientist, Professor Michael Grubb of Imperial College, London, first suggested that these two unlikely successes might become the models for a worldwide assault on global warming. Guilty gases could be identified, targets and times negotiated for their reduction, and nations coming ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... In 1917, justifying his reluctance to involve the United States in the European war, Woodrow Wilson told his secretary of state that ‘white civilisation and its domination over the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact.’ Hysteria about ‘white civilisation’ gripped America after Europe’s self-mutilation in the First ...”

“... Alex Salmond’s predecessor as leader of the Scottish National Party, the social democrat Gordon Wilson, happened to be our local MP in East Dundee. The gap between him and radical socialists like George Galloway, then cutting his teeth in the bear pit of the Dundee Labour Party, was great, but seemed neither so great nor so significant as the gap between ...”

“... have played a bad hand well. Going into the 1970 election, he seemed the obvious choice to succeed Wilson as Labour leader, and prime minister, whenever the latter stood down. But after Labour unexpectedly lost the election, the question of entry into Europe again became a live political issue. Jenkins, believing that Britain should be part of what eventually ...”

“... rather than too few, plausible hypotheses. To borrow a sociobiological example from Edward O. Wilson, cicada aggregations can be explained within the theory of natural selection as bringing the sexes together for mating, as permitting loud enough singing to confuse predators, or as saturating the local predators with a superabundance of prey. As ...”

“... a guise of compassion.Later the same year A Minority by ‘Gordon Westwood’ (the sociologist Michael Schofield) presented the results of interviews with 127 queer men, with statistical breakdowns of where and how often they found partners, and of patterns of friendship and courtship which turned out to be much like hetero ones. The result is pleasingly ...”

“... in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these ...”

“... 85 per cent of their trade in dollars.In Trade Wars Are Class Wars (2020), Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis showed that the US functions as the world’s importer of last resort – absorbing the trade surpluses of Europe and China – and that the American working class pays the price. But they didn’t discuss the power that accrues to the US through ...”

“... in this study – not only his rapport with Irish-America, but the influence of President Wilson on his policies and tactics. The belief that Dev’s responsibility for and role in the Civil War were minor is more controversial; and even more so is the claim that the sectarianism of the Constitution was justified because it involved a tacit ...”