“... forward. The willingness of the Lib Dems to accept an apparent fait accompli, like the NHS Bill or Michael Gove’s education ‘revolution’ or even the extent of the spending cuts, was the result not simply of parliamentary weakness or feeble leadership, but of the ambiguities of their own policy and rhetoric. For the last thirty years or so, the Lib Dems ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his prolific (hetero)sexual adventures: he had, says a more up-to-date historian than Rowse, Michael MacDonald, ‘a mesmerising personality and the sexual appetite of a goat’, and studded his diary with his ‘haleking’, as he put it, with an A to Z of his women, and with planning or avoiding such occasions as his consultation of the stars ...”

“... at Oxford: ‘His body of work . . . amounts to a class action lawsuit against all manner of powers that be, from inept social-service agencies in the UK to oppressive Central American regimes.’ His early television productions – ten were broadcast in the BBC’s Wednesday Play slot between 1965 and 1969 – had a crusading urgency that reflected the ...”

“... charge was a matter for the prosecuting authorities. Not long afterwards the attorney general, Sir Michael Havers, told the Commons more candidly: ‘One must realise that the 600-year-old statute is couched in such archaic language that it would be difficult to prove all the necessary ingredients of the crime and for a modern jury to come to grips with the ...”

“... president plays no role. In Georgia, for example, concerns about the gubernatorial abuse of pardon powers in the 1940s led to the creation of an independent board to handle the process.If there was a conspiracy to keep Trump from running, criminal charges would be a cumbersome method to choose. No provision in the US constitution prevented Debs from running in ...”

“... was boredom. Most people were interesting first time round. ‘Wednesday 9 July 1941: Lunched with Michael Foot, whom I liked very much. He hated and hates Chamberlain even more than I. His views, though a trifle too leftist, are sound.’ But they did not turn out to be permanently palatable. ‘Friday 3 October 1952: After dinner we watched a political ...”

“... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...”

“... a private investigator called Glenn Mulcaire with violations of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. After pleading guilty, both men received short prison sentences in January 2007. That might easily have been the end of the matter. A number of high-ranking officers in the Met had personal and financial links with News International ...”

“... of Harold Shipman; announced new restrictions on demonstrations outside Parliament; extended the powers of Police Community Service officers to tackle beggars, and angrily denied that this meant people would be being arrested for dropping crisp packets; said that failed asylum seekers would be put to compulsory unpaid work in return for the right to claim ...”

“... and all that. I reached my limit when I got to an episode of Trashfuture and heard him discussing Michael Young’s original conception of ‘meritocracy’, something he explores at length in the book. He had to pause while his hosts pointed out that Michael Young is (drum roll) the father of Toby Young, free-speech ...”

“... Zidi in François Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks; sometimes female, such as Gina McKee in Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland, Christina Ricci in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and Chloë Sevigny in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco; and occasionally male and heterosexual but out of sorts, like Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Mike Figgis’s The Loss of ...”

“... called Employment Acts, the new laws first restricted or ended the unions’ most expansive powers: the closed shop, which made union membership compulsory in some workplaces; and the secondary picket, the common strike practice of picketing enterprises related to the one where the primary dispute was taking place. Then the legislation turned to the ...”

“... of human activity and contact, silting up in vast unchartable archives. In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan has written a concise history of the technology that has wrought this change and the commercial and creative forces that have shaped it. His account is elegant and impressively well-informed. He ranges across the entire technical field, from ...”

“... treated like exotic gadgets to be operated with the help of instruction manuals. The shadow of Michael Gove, who as secretary of state for education between 2010 and 2014 insisted that children have traditional grammar drummed into them, still falls heavily on English schools. ‘Dear Gavin Williamson, could you tell parents what a fronted adverbial ...”