“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... be at the actual scene of the killing to be found guilty and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as ...”

“... suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political lexicon’ in 1980 via the Lancashire Tory MP John Lee, who announced that ‘those of us who represent the regions are increasingly aware of the North-South divide, as 21st-century industry is increasingly sucked towards the South-East.’ The phrase first appeared in Hansard a few months earlier, used by ...”

“... thing on occasion, for all its turns and denials. Calling her ‘the leaderene’, as Norman St John-Stevas did, wasn’t candid, or apt, or funny. The old fellows were bound to wish to hit back from time to time at the Handbag, and they did manage to get rid of it, none too soon, in the end.12 April 2013 Servicemen are starting to wonder more and more ...”

“... intellectuals’ talked about wine. The film director Karel Reisz was there, and his wife Betsy Blair, who had been in Hollywood at the time Lillian had written Picture, but she thought they were insufficiently reverent and snubbed them. Some people believed that Lillian actually hated actors, like she hated most people, but made an exception for the ones ...”

“... Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak reactor of 1981. Who now complains about that? 4. The Human Costs of War. These are indeed ...”

“... was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many years. Ackerley’s first reaction to ...”

“... disgusted him. He complained in his journal of ‘the coarse vulgarity around me ... Dr Blair accosted me with a vile tone: “Hoo did you leave Sawmuel?” ’ Samuel Johnson died in 1784, and Boswell’s next trip to London was a more feverish snatching at social and sensual experience than ever before. On the famous day of Friday 13 May, 1785, he ...”

“... but Black would not wear him. So the paper championed Douglas Hurd as a weightier alternative to John Major, whom Hastings regarded as attractive but not up to the job. When Major emerged from the second ballot as the winner, Black was in the uncomfortable position of owning a Conservative paper, arguably the most important in the country, which had ...”

“... monarchs, like most mortals, have scarcely been individuals of unimpeachable character – King John? Henry VIII? James II? Compared with many previous sovereigns, the failings of the Windsors which Kelley describes with such evident relish seem relatively harmless, and exactly what one might expect of any isolated, privileged, undereducated, self-indulgent ...”

“... to celebrate the anarchic force of madness while voting Liberal Democrat. You can back Tony Blair and Pierre Bourdieu with equal enthusiasm. In the era of Bolshevism, by contrast, theory had at times to hobble hard to keep abreast of what was happening on the streets. The Petersburg Soviet tore up and rewrote Marxist theories of political power, while ...”

“... an idea they did not learn simply by glancing over the adjacent shoulders of Bush and Blair. The Marines of the First Recon Battalion were the first generation of American soldiers launched into open-ended conflict since Vietnam, and Generation Kill, an account published in 2004 by the Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright of the battalion’s ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”