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“... The phrase was used as a way of signalling economic and moral commitment at the same time. Gordon Brown – who liked to cloak redistributive policies in communitarian, traditionalist rhetoric – is said to have been the first to use it, in 1995. The Blair, Brown and Cameron governments all repeatedly claimed to be on the ...”

“... Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, John Kendrick Bangs, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown and Henry Van Dyke (‘the friend of the family’). Apart from arranging for the girl to have met her fiancé at college, so that the gentleman in question remains a promising mystery to her relatives, Howells did little in his chapter to advance the ...”

“... Yesterday, his new novel, is an attempt to bring to life the thesis of the novelist in Mao II, Bill Gray: The novel used to feed our search for meaning . . . It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us towards something larger and darker. So we turn to the ...”

“... from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon Brown’s press secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with the headline ‘Brown Saves ...”

“... has been trying to achieve. MPs have at least the advantage of being able to ask the mover of a Bill for clarification. Judges, who have to do the best they can with the words on the page, are not generally as brusque as the Victorian Law Lord who said: ‘This beats me.’ A ready source of help, which I hope will routinely be available when the coming ...”

“... He is happy to admit to the various and necessary time-saving devices, back-scratchings and brown-nosings that other writers do their best to disavow. At the end of What a Carve Up! (1994) Coe acknowledges the work of Frank King, and writes: ‘the only repayment I can offer him is to recommend that readers make every effort to seek out these and other ...”

“... the purchase of Wayne Rooney from Everton in 2004. He was in his office, and the Everton chairman, Bill Kenwright, was weeping copiously. Through his tears Kenwright makes a phone call and hands the receiver to Ferguson. On the other end an elderly female voice berates him: ‘Don’t you dare think you’re getting that boy for nothing. That boy’s worth ...”

“... Panetta, Michael Morell, John Brennan. We already have the memoir of the current CIA director, Bill Burns, but not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too torture-heavy to be published.Catherine Ashton’s memoir offers neither brutal candour nor aristocratic irony. Instead, she aspires to sincerity. Ashton, like Pompeo, wasn’t a ...”

“... in the importance of ‘parent power’, he contrived to forget that his own Local Government Bill was about to abolish the commission that he had set up to enhance parent power three years before. When he dismissed the fears voiced by objectors to super-casinos, he closed his eyes to the harm they would do to the indebted and vulnerable. When he ...”

“... In 1932,​ Aldous Huxley published The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, a large brown volume, printed in a curiously elaborate type, which has no doubt become something of a special item in booksellers’ catalogues. It contained 889 pages. Exactly 30 years later Harry T. Moore edited The Collected Letters of D ...”

“... know: let’s find our angriest, shoutiest, most tribal, most aggressive party loyalist. As Craig Brown joked in the Mail on Sunday, it is as if, instead of turning to Doctor Watson for advice, Sherlock Holmes had instead consulted the Hound of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises ...”

“... David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget David Trevinnick and Graham Riddick, suspended from their jobs as Parliamentary Private ...”

“... the campaign that Labour had insufficiently recognised Thatcher’s achievements. Both Blair and Brown became increasingly reluctant to criticise the Conservative government or to admit that the principal victims of its policies had been the people the Labour Party was founded to protect. This led them further away from Smith, who never doubted that much of ...”

“... square, you squash. What you can’t squash, you square.’ His press secretary, William ‘Bronco Bill’ Sutherland, had a reputation every bit as evil as that of Alastair Campbell or Gordon Brown’s frightful pair, Charlie Whelan and Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride. Nor was it always the PM’s press spokesmen who dripped ...”

“... muddy underfoot, an illicit delight. It’s warm and windless, the stones of the abbey sodden and brown from the amount of moisture they’ve absorbed. Spectacular here are the toilet arrangements, the reredorter set above a narrow chasm with a stream still running along the bottom. Unique, though (or at least I haven’t seen another), is the tannery ...”