“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Dáil Éireann was proscribed in September 1919. In the subsequent guerrilla warfare of 1919-21 Michael Collins, the Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence of the Volunteers or Irish Republican Army, rose to prominence. In 1920 Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern ...”

“... capitalist interests. Liberals presented this as a dismantling of the oppressive, arbitrary powers of an ancien régime. They were not hostile to order, but believed that a more supple, just and acceptable form of it would emerge from discussion and consensus-building in national political institutions.Fawcett’s argument is that conservative political ...”

“... the Lynskey Tribunal and the Aberfan Inquiry are examples) and inquiries under specific statutory powers (policing, childcare, medical services). In addition any public body has the inherent power to appoint anyone to inquire into anything on its behalf (prominently at the moment, the Scott Inquiry into the Matrix-Churchill affair). Even the coroner’s ...”

“... it. He died in 1962. In his admirably perceptive introduction to the now reprinted masterpiece, Michael Holroyd comments on Hamilton’s Scottish provenance, something that had never occurred to me when I first took to him. His father had been an eccentric and a ‘character’, whose powers of acting and sermonising had ...”

“... as bluff Yorkshire mill-owner; another one from Central Casting.’) Unsurprisingly, Hoggart’s powers of observation and empathy weaken as the gap between observer and observed widens, most noticeably in his musings on students and the permissive society. Memoirs of such length and depth can be a mixed blessing for a biographer: they are a resource but ...”

“... Jeremy Corbyn, however maladroit and out of step with the party’s rebranding since the era of Michael Foot, is the darling of the growing Labour membership, and that his performance in the general election of 2017 vastly exceeded the party’s expectations. For all that the Labour Party has tried to exploit Remainer discontent with the May government’s ...”

“... that the main reason for the astonishing success of the First Crusade was that the various Islamic powers never realised what was actually happening; and John Gillingham, the Lion-Heart’s biographer, could scarcely complain of his discussion of the Acre massacre (on which Mr Finucane is more lurid). If Newby’s Saladin somehow fails to inspire, this is ...”

“... Thompson, it was ‘a group of fat, rich nations feeding each other goodies’. Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Tony Benn led a powerful Labour campaign against the Common Market, in itself a pejorative term on the left. But Roy Jenkins and others on Labour’s centre-right emphasised reconciliation with former enemies, highlighting in particular the ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... it lawyers alone who sustain the cult. In his Bancroft Prize-winning book, Arming America (2000), Michael Bellesiles, a historian at Emory University in Georgia, dared to challenge the view that the widespread possession of firearms in the mid-18th century had underpinned the success of the movement for independence, and found members of the National Rifle ...”

“... make this one of the most aerated and various novels he has written. Her voice shows Updike’s powers of ventriloquism to the full. In inventing his narrators, Updike sets himself the task of creating an idiom differentiated from his own and at the same time sufficiently flexible to carry the burden of his own urge to notice and to evoke. So what happens ...”

“... of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris ...”