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“... veto an honour for Edward Heath or Harold Macmillan than Tory dons would veto Harold Wilson. Even Michael Foot might have slipped through as a representative of the old order, a Thirties-ish, literary champion of the supremacy of Parliament, who caused offence mainly by mistaking the Cenotaph for the Aldermaston March. But Tony Benn of Westminster School and ...”

“... for progressive devolution, it does not break entirely new ground: the concept of ‘reserved powers’ goes back to Gladstone’s Home Rule Bills, and a multi-stage process was built into the 1920 Government of Ireland Act with its provision for a Council of Ireland. The mechanics of the new proposals, however, are more sophisticated, and allow workable ...”

“... the saints who visited her, when, for instance, she was pressed at her trial to specify whether St Michael wore wings or not. What Miss Warner emphasises, however, is that her experience was not of mystical rapture, but had a mundane, realistic bearing: she was being instructed to leave Domrémy and undertake a mission for her bleeding country, and this ...”

“... own. The simultaneous eruption of the Suez crisis, and the consequent discord among the Western powers, horrified our Hungarian hosts. As they saw it, London and Paris were throwing away the moral authority that might have deterred Moscow from committing aggression in Hungary. ‘You’d better get out while you can, before the Russians return and cut the ...”

“... like the poor cat in the adage, between temptation and abstinence, to the detriment of his powers. If I was to update Calverley I would include a stanza or two on the splendour of cigarettes as levellers and ice-breakers while travelling. Auden may have coupled ‘the shared cigarette’ with ‘the fumbled unsatisfactory embrace before hurting’, but ...”

“... the inhabitants of Southwold crowded around George VI to ‘touch’ him for his magical curative powers. These stories are very similar to those which have appeared about Diana and the effect she had on the ill. Their recovery, it is said, has been ‘like a miracle’: what is 20th-century about that is the care people take not to say: ‘it’s a ...”

“... a creation of the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and like them it had almost magical powers. Antiquarians claimed they could speak to the dead; magi claimed they could call them back to life; and indexes genuinely showed the reader where to find exemplary figures doing great things, as well as what they had said and written on any given ...”

“... David Davis, there is not much evidence of a new beginning. He has dropped virtually none of Michael Howard’s baggage: he simply proved more adept at reordering it than Davis. He has persisted in arguing that we can have both lower taxes and better public services: an argument the electorate regards sceptically and something that has eluded all British ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of ...”

“... Occupy Handbook, one essay that stands out is an old-fashioned piece of historical reportage by Michael Hiltzik. It’s called ‘The 5 per cent’, and it tells the story of the campaign during the 1930s to secure a decent social security programme for the elderly. In 1934, the number of Americans over the age of 65 was seven million, or just 5 per cent of ...”

“... her to maintain her sanity while under house arrest. While she was at Oxford, she met her husband, Michael Aris. She was not an outstanding student, Wintle finds: ‘the moralist in Suu Kyi tended . . . towards assertion of what she instinctively knew,’ rather than argument and exposition. In the 1970s and 1980s she followed her husband as he built his ...”

“... Within days of becoming chancellor, Brown announced that he would relinquish one of his main powers, that of setting interest rates, which would instead be set by the Bank of England. Was this justifiable either as an economic or as a political decision? It was, on the face of it, a curious thing for a Labour chancellor to do. The Bank hardly had the ...”

“... that the song means a great deal to his wife, Gretta, and longer still the essential truth, that Michael Furey, her dead first love, used to sing it to her. These layers of Gabriel’s unknowing are hardly different from our own (‘What about the song? Why does that make you cry?’ ‘And who was the person long ago?’), and at the end of the story, when ...”

“... attempts are being made to argue that you can make ‘safe’ cuts by spending more effectively. Michael Gove, the education spokesman, is particularly strong on this. But one thing the Thatcher governments did demonstrate is that there are no ‘safe’ cuts to be found in the public services – or, if there are, no one has yet found where to make ...”

“... postwar reactions to Nazi atrocities had threatened to obliterate – this helped the occupying powers in their efforts to ‘re-educate’ ordinary Germans. While the British adhered to the well-established concept of the ‘two Germanies’, and tried to bring out the civilised tradition of Beethoven and Goethe while suppressing the uncivilised tradition ...”