“... of Morrissey to ‘blur’ his sexuality, to keep himself mysterious. (‘The first time I heard Neil Tennant describe the Pet Shop Boys as a gay band … I wished he hadn’t,’ Almond is quoted as saying in Jones’s book.) But time alters your sense of what risk really is. Soft Cell were pouting at the lads and their fads and their bigoted old dads. It ...”

“... industrial landscape was a major example of sentimental welfarism ... it had to be fought at any price. Moreover, she saw the political need to defeat the NUM – the Coldstream Guards of organised labour – if she was to succeed in her self-appointed role of kicking the whole trade union movement into the Tory future and away from the principles of Labour ...”

“... dribbling on his loud tie, but to sit there with your eyes closed is sometimes to wonder at the price of the ticket. Other people find the trade-union con-man Lance Boyle hard to take – offended in their radical beliefs or having decided (correctly, by his creator’s own confession) that Lance has set out to bore them rigid. No matter how rebarbative the ...”

“... had good reason. Little blame can be attached to the politicians who cultivated Maxwell, such as Neil Kinnock. How could any Labour leader afford to alienate the owner of the biggest Labour-supporting newspaper? As for the Mirror’s journalists, working for Maxwell was no doubt grim – but most newspapers have proprietors who are less than ideal. There ...”

“... line of attack. All this laborious shoring up of the post-war status quo, however, is too much for Neil Kinnock, who, almost alone, tries to strike a radical note. This takes the form of another assault on education, especially higher education, for being élitist and academically-orientated. Alas, like Prince Rupert, Mr Kinnock tends to lead the cavalry ...”

“... moving from building-site to Fleet Street and out again in less than ten years. The free or cut-price offers of dictionaries and flower-pots in the 1930s have given way to bingo and cash prizes. As for content, most of the popular papers are as cheap and nasty as ever, apparently as indifferent to a more educated public as they are contemptuous of the Press ...”

“... a screen name and claimed to be able to provide a complete dossier within seven to ten days. The price for targeting individual users was $4995 per name. According to their website (long since deleted but still available on archive.org), ‘48-hour turnaround is available for an additional $1995 per screen name.’ Around the time that le Chêne was creating ...”

“... right to insist that Parkinson’s personal difficulty – for which he had already paid a heavy price – was no reason for him not to continue to make a valuable contribution to the performance of the Government and that the press was absolutely wrong. But the press has won, more’s the pity.’ And he closed his sermon on the career of Cecil ...”

“... publication was as good economically as any since the war, with unemployment at 1.2 per cent, price rises at 3.3 per cent, wage rises at 7.6 per cent, and the balance of payments in surplus. The idea of a secure and ever-expanding economy, in which poverty had been abolished and prosperity was available for all, was soon to be undermined by international ...”

“... Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil Kinnock had said that to ‘lose badly’ was to come in with less than 250 seats. The Party won just 229. The Conservatives did shed some votes in the middle classes. But they are picking up support among the working members of the working class. Skilled ...”

“... are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed,’ the novelist Neil Gunn wrote in 1935, thinking of the deserted straths in Sutherland from which his ancestors had been evicted early in the previous century. The Sutherland evictions were notorious. Between 1807 and 1821, agents acting for the Countess of Sutherland and her ...”

“... index’, sharing with Romania and Greece the lowest ranking in the European Union. The highest price paid for an individual vote was said to be about €15, and the proof that the voter had fulfilled his part of the bargain was a photo of the completed ballot paper taken with a mobile phone. (A number of countries now ban voters from taking mobile phones ...”

“... his case to the courts, and ultimately to the Supreme Court, where Trump’s three appointees (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) would be sure to tip the balance in his favour. That there was no case – at least no case that could get a serious hearing – didn’t matter. What mattered was to keep up the pressure until the other side ...”

“... as if the word ‘economic’ was ‘economical’: if so, Londoners are still paying a high price for the error. The 1875 Public Health Act conferred a power to lay water mains on local authorities which supplied water – something they could not do unless they had first laid water mains. The courts cured this by deciding the Act meant what Parliament ...”

“... especially while adhering to Livingstone’s promise of a fouryear fare freeze.Prescott quotes a Price Waterhouse Coopers report that costed a bonds issue at £3 billion more than PPP. Livingstone replies that the LSE concluded that the PPP plans are ‘flawed in principle and impractical’. Recent research at University College London suggests that bonds ...”