“... Government. The soft Left – those, broadly speaking, who cut their political teeth around Neil Kinnock – felt they had much more baggage to ditch. Unlike the Gaitskellites, they came to believe, quite reasonably, that their mix of policies was unacceptable to the electorate. The trouble was they did not know when to stop. It is the first step that ...”

“... My Lai or Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar at Woodstock, or of Khrushchev’s visit to Hollywood or Neil Armstrong’s bounce on the Moon: it is Abraham Zapruder’s home-movie of President Kennedy’s assassination, a concatenation of live seconds which changed the public imagination, allowing through its innocent portals a loud proclamation about the end of ...”

“... No one this time last year would have predicted a victory for the Left in France, yet it is in a sense far easier to explain Jospin’s triumph than Blair’s. President Chirac, elected in 1995 on a promise that he would reduce unemployment, had actually done the opposite; and, faced with the need of his deeply unpopular prime minister, Alain Juppé, to squeeze the economy yet further to meet the Maastricht criteria, called a snap election simply because he feared things would get tougher by the time Parliament’s mandate ran out in 1998 ...”

“... in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police devoted far more resources than to the ...”

“... be more of this. 23 May. Ros Chatto, my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then ...”

“... this sort of thing leads to were provided by the missions to Moscow of Michael Foot and later of Neil Kinnock. The Kremlin’s defence specialists, accustomed to Bundestag deputies able to discuss throw-weights, Mirving, telemetry and so forth, discovered that the British MPs, for all their passionate dedication to disarmament, had to work hard to make sure ...”

“... Powell is a divisive figure, which of course he was, in terms of British social relations. But, as Andrew Gamble showed nearly fifty years ago in his classic account, The Conservative Nation, Powell offered members and voters a politically potent vision of a Conservative patria in a way Edward Heath never did. At many points during the last 150 years, Tory ...”

“... within reach at last.1 May 1997. Run into John Eatwell, formerly economic adviser to the hapless Neil Kinnock and now Lord Eatwell, President of Queen’s, at Cambridge station. We naively agree that it can’t possibly be a landslide, given the percentage of the British electorate which will vote Conservative no matter what the level of arrogance, disunity ...”

“... for questions’ controversy also later accounted for two senior ministers, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton, who had to leave their posts at the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Trade respectively. The paradox behind this extraordinary succession of resignations is that none of them has been for what traditional constitutional law would ...”

“... wish it to be true. Harold Wilson was obsessed with the idea that the Daily Mirror could undo him; Neil Kinnock in his defeat accepted that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was the voice of the electorate. In reality, Beaverbrook often got public opinion quite ...”

“... In A Wicked Irony: Rhetoric of Lermontov’s ‘A Hero of Our Time’ (1995), A.D.P Briggs and Andrew Barratt suggest that Pechorin may be in love with Princess Mary and desperate to control this unwanted weakness. Near the end of the book he tells Mary that he is leaving town. She pales and sickens before him, and Pechorin says, in an aside to the ...”

“... in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, concurring opinions by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and dissents by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.* Roberts held that the admissions programmes at Harvard and UNC ran afoul of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which ...”

“... enough to spell instant trouble. The kind of rhythms, when used as voice-overs, that did for Neil Kinnock. (Marks made a play for his fellow countryman in Pisa Airport – aborted when Kinnock reminded Marks’s wife, Judy, of an evil screw from Brixton.) The con works because it’s genuine. The man is Mr Nice, he has no spite in him. The villains ...”

“... It would be like Fire Island without the gays.’ 13 November. A propos the Queen’s Speech Andrew Marr on The World at One talks of the future saying, ‘If the war with Iraq goes well . . .’’ the conditional not to do with the likelihood of war but only with its conduct. No one demurs. But Bush is extraordinary. Seldom can there have been a leader ...”

“... tunnel vision is hilarious. Writing about his experiences in the 1992 election, when Labour under Neil Kinnock snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, he says: For me, two images stand out from the last few days of the campaign: on the one hand, John Major on a simple wooden soapbox making his final campaign speeches; on the other, Labour’s big-budget ...”