“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... corps had moved on to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, which required a lot of telling. In 1995 Michael Holman – a Rhodesian dissident under Ian Smith’s regime who went on to become Africa editor at the Financial Times – confessed privately to a perverse sense of relief that press coverage of ‘ethnic conflict’ was no longer ghettoised in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pergamon by the American firm Leasco. It is now widely thought that the inspectors exceeded their powers, and the rules have been tightened up. Subsequent to this, he was voted out of the Pergamon chair. As Labour MP for Buckingham from 1964 to 1970, Maxwell had brazenly insisted on making his maiden speech a couple of hours after taking his seat. For a long ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no political opposition. At state or district level, this did not hold. But there, the centre had powers that could deal swiftly with any local trouble. These too were heirlooms of the Raj, eagerly appropriated by Congress. Preventive detention dated back to a Bengal State Prisoners Regulation of 1818, and had been a standard weapon of colonial rule. At ...”

“... in the UK’s response to the pandemic, the government’s messengers were richly rewarded. Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office gave Topham Guerin a £3 million contract for communications work. The contract – agreed without any competitive tendering – was signed in early May but, unusually, backdated to 17 March, two days before Lee Cain’s Zoom ...”

“... the Democrats, with a deal to keep government running, then threatened to invoke emergency powers to build the wall his right-wing base demands, and at last offered a hint of moderate conciliation. In the meantime the actually existing Trump administration was falling apart in several directions. It was also adding new members who have committed it to ...”

“... be felt, five of the six men who were ambushed and shot were unarmed at the time; and a sixth – Michael Tighe, shot dead in the barn – had no paramilitary connections. John Stalker’s special brief was to determine the involvement of the RUC in these events. One of the most disquieting revelations made in the press has been the degree to which the ...”