“... secretaries of the 1980s, who believed little could be done about crime, things got out of hand. Michael Howard’s tough regime and then Straw’s were necessary to get matters back under control. Yet the fuddy-duddies were on the whole right: imprisoning everyone does not work. Howard set out to exploit the assumption that Labour was vulnerable on crime by ...”

“... heroic even – but there are not many real experts on it, and fewer still with the literary powers necessary to recreate a way of life so remote from most modern experience. There are still big sailing ships at sea (though none that carry commercial cargoes); it is still possible to work aloft as a topman, encountering many of the same dangers as ...”

“... of dramatic form, beginning in the mid-Fifties with Preface to Film (written together with Michael Orrom). Here and in his later books Communications and Television: Technology and Cultural Form he set out to show how, thanks to the conventions of acting, directing and programming – not to mention the restricted access to the means of expression ...”

“... lay also the origins of British imperial ideology. This is not an entirely new idea. In the 1970s, Michael Hechter argued for the link between the ‘internal colonialism’ he saw England as implementing in its ‘Celtic fringe’ from the 16th century onwards, and the evolution of its empire overseas. And as early as 1907, Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of ...”

“... created a constitution with an advanced Bill of Rights, and a court of high calibre with full powers of enforcement, Saras Jagwanth has the candour to start by saying: ‘It is difficult to be sceptical of the South African experience of entrenching a justiciable Bill of Rights.’ I know of nobody who seriously suggests that South Africa would be better ...”

“... she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ‘invaluable help, talent and patience’. You certainly don’t hear the Cherie described by Michael Levy, ‘every bit the get-ahead barrister’, who on their ...”

“... from the debate on annexation. The questions of whether they would get a state, what territory and powers it would have, whether they would be granted citizenship, residency or some other status in the annexed territory, what rights they would or would not be given and which of them would be stripped of their Israeli citizenship were being decided solely by ...”

“... rare sight in Britain before the railways. Suddenly they were everywhere. Writing in the 1960s, Michael Robbins said: ‘The Victorians who created the railway look like a race imbued with some demonic energy.’ In the prologue to Railways and the Victorian Imagination (1999), Michael Freeman prints three maps of the ...”

“... would have more soberly encouraged the proper authorities, central and local, to exercise all the powers and draw on all the cash they needed. The malign combination of an over-centralised system and a hopelessly narcissistic prime minister has been fatal.The centralisation of power is integral to the Johnson government’s project to restore the old ...”

“... the top, tells of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and President Johnson’s request for war-making powers in Indo-China. The second headline, also right across the page in what must have been a tough day for sub-editors, reports the FBI’s discovery of three corpses, believed to be of three missing civil-rights workers, in a swamp in Mississippi. For me, and ...”

“... that have been reiterated recently by public intellectuals such as Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff and Leon Wieseltier. To hold his own against such adversaries, he suggests that he isn’t speaking solely for himself. Instead, he is giving recognition to the ‘millennial and post-millennial generations’ who find little in liberalism worth ...”

“... that ‘God has given me the extraordinary faculty of seeing into futurity,’ as well as magic powers, which she was loath to demonstrate in case it made God cross. Meryon thought the magic and messianism were also à part, and didn’t affect her mental state in any other way. This was probably because he was so hugely impressed with the qualities of her ...”

“... about which they are coy. Although the archaic and feudal ‘sexual contract’ which gave powers to fathers and patriarchs (thereby subordinating sons as well as daughters) became obsolete, it was replaced with an implied contract between male citizens which establishes the subordination of women to men. The ‘sexual contract’ which underlies ...”

“... Britain by William Klein examines some of the modifications. The picture is further modified by Michael Mendle’s searching essay on the constitutional programme of Charles I’s Parliamentary opponents in 1641-2. In the emergency created by royal mismanagement, Mendle argues, MPs were concerned less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive ...”

“... way, when Shaw converted the Webbs to Stalinism. One might have thought that a sense of failing powers would at least have induced him to give up actresses, but no, at 70 he had an interesting and rather risky affair with an American woman called Molly Tompkins, 42 years his junior. Fame can be aphrodisiac, but old age is normally not, and the latter will ...”