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“... Israel offered Egypt a separate peace. Nasser could have had in 1968-9 what Sadat achieved at Camp David. Indeed, he might have got Gaza as well. But Nasser was opposed to Egypt’s deserting its allies and concluding a separate peace. ‘The West Bank,’ he declared, ‘is more important to me than Sinai.’ The substitution of Nixon for Johnson made no ...”

“... of biblical truth. For the modern reader, such relentless classicism can cause odd problems. As David Daiches once remarked, we are often in the uncomfortable position of forming our knowledge of classical mythology by inferring from Miltonic allusion. Most modern students probably first encounter Ovid’s Narcissus through Milton’s Eve, gazing on her own ...”

“... a different – more dramatic – version of Wasserstein’s Secret War in Shanghai. Hemon plays fairer here, using Bailey’s book Mission to Tashkent as the blueprint for Moser-Ethering’s ‘many memoirs’, beginning with Sparking the Fire, which we are told is the only written record of Osman’s existence. Bailey’s account mentions a spy called ...”

“... and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that ...”

“... who was really the toughest. In an extraordinary passage, Hamilton writes that EPO made the sport fairer, because it ‘granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you’d ever imagined, in both racing and training’. Races ‘weren’t rolls of the genetic dice, or who happened to be on form that day. They didn’t depend on ...”

“... has ideals, but not standards,’ said Lucy Masterman in 1913, ‘or perhaps it would be fairer to say, not many.’ And Mrs Masterman’s journal gives no evidence that she was a snob. These defects were outweighed by the possession, to an unusual degree, of qualities valuable in high politics. Lloyd George had learned the trade in a hard ...”

“... ambitions: Scotland as world leader in renewables, a new tax system, wider borrowing powers, ‘a fairer Scotland’ and so forth. Independence with its referendum no longer protrudes. It begins to make sense to want an SNP government, but also to want to stay in the United Kingdom ‘for the moment, see how it goes, maybe I’ll feel different one day ...”

“... towards a section of the working class since 1979: the promise of a rearranged, if in no way fairer, set of criteria for admission to the ruling class, and a carefully targeted neo-Victorian discourse of class differentiation. Chavs acknowledges but doesn’t explore the fact that the success of the term ‘chav’, and the ...”

“... David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables in this country: those accused of committing a crime. It will strip away safeguards that have taken centuries to accrue, and alienate criminal suspects further from society as a whole ...”

“... son by throwing a sharpening-steel at him in a fit of rage (the boy was the same age as his cousin David Herbert). Might it not have been male violence, as much as maternal discontent, that made Lawrence ‘abnormal’? Lawrence, like his father and uncle, was given to wild fits of rage. When confronted with nothing more threatening than a blank sheet of ...”

“... income. Responding to the increasingly prevalent view that Britain had a serious mobility problem, David Cameron’s coalition government rebranded Labour’s Child Poverty Commission as the Social Mobility Commission, with Alan Milburn as its head. Milburn gave a lot of attention to recruitment to elite positions – his flagship report was on fair access to ...”

“... pen obliterating any programme listing that included black or Irish people, gays, lesbians or David Frost’. The relationship cooled when Ken junior joined the Labour Party and ceased completely when he became leader of the Greater London Council, but for a time they lived under the same roof in an intimate and sometimes disagreeable household that ...”

“... it would appear, among Western countries, to be least true of the United Kingdom.’ The second is David Donnison, in his The Politics of Poverty. It was published in 1982, but the remark I wish to quote is about the year 1978: ‘Labour had lost its convictions about poverty and the redistribution of incomes. Or perhaps the voters at large had lost those ...”

“... of how formless the history of an institution becomes once its public procedures are meddled with. Fairer, more decent and catering to the individual the new system may be but as memorable and even ceremonial, no and that is a loss, though these days not an uncommon one. The school is not fee-paying, a grammar school such as Leeds Grammar School or Manchester ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”