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“... I was five or six       – I can’t recall – the land for miles was sick with foot and mouth and grateful of the work                         my father travelled the length of the county                                digging pits for slaughtered herds. On farm after farm for miles ...”

“... covering the case of a teenage boy who had been beaten up by a policeman in Thurso, which is near John o’Groats. There was the most fearful hullabaloo based on the belief that this sort of thing could only happen in the wilderness of the Far North. The press demanded that this errant policeman be brought to justice. There was a similar furore a year or two ...”

“... boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even mentioned John Major as ‘a close friend’. The programme-makers arranged further such meetings, one in a Spanish castle, to which Greer was asked to invite his contacts. Greer’s network of helpful politicians was about to be exposed when Central Television and its new ...”

“... John Searle’s subtitle alludes to the mode of reflection about language which he recommended, and showed in operation, in his earlier book Speech Acts. What the theory of speech acts offers is a view of language which is to allow us to take full account of the fact that linguistic behaviour is behaviour, without lapsing into a behaviouristic obliteration of the inner life ...”

“... ceased to milk his memory for flagrantly sentimental recollections. For the 1964 Election Michael Foot wrote a Bevanite hagiography of Wilson, which he quickly expunged from his own Who’s Who entry (the opposite of the Kinnock technique) when Wilson’s Government, despite the presence in high office of Crossman and Barbara Castle, proved a ...”

“... a sadistic buffoon and could never have been tolerated even by the long-suffering Labour Party. John Wheatley was the intellectual and organising genius behind the Clydesiders, but you have only to watch the surviving newsreels to see why Maxton had to be the leader of that group, and you only have to study Maxton’s confused utterances to see how he could ...”

“... I take first, however, a novel which this drawing fits in a more simple and literal way. John Kennedy Toole was dead some years when A Confederacy of Dunces appeared, having, so the Foreword records, killed himself in depression at his failure to get the book published. One cannot think him wrong to have despaired, when a book which should have ...”

“... for the security forces. Would they at last teach the cheeky croppies from Derry a lesson? Had not John Taylor, Northern Ireland’s Home Affairs Minister, declared, after the shooting of Cusack and Beattie: ‘I feel that it may be necessary to shoot even more in the forthcoming months’? Had not the newly-formed extremist Democratic Unionist Party announced ...”

“... cannot expect Lobby journalists to allow themselves to be perceived as part of a campaign. Paul Foot of the Mirror writes as pungently as anyone in modern journalism, but he has a weekly column to sustain, and Robert Maxwell is by no means as anxious about the fate of the Belgrano as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish ...”

“... Industrialists, bankers, rich Tories of every description felt that the day of doom was nigh. John Davies, Secretary of State for Industry in the Tory Government and a former Director-General of the CBI, called his children round the hearth to tell them this was the last Christmas of its kind they would be enjoying together. Tony Benn, his planning ...”

“... posted outside Oldfield’s London flat. Waiters who took him meals there were photographed. Sir John Junor, then a columnist for the Sunday Express, now boasts that he was told by Sir David McNee, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, that Oldfield was a homosexual. Junor passed this on to the Prime Minister in a private letter. Eventually, someone ...”

“... probably set out to write a book about the three dock-strike leaders, Tom Mann, Ben Tillett and John Burns. At some stage, he presumably plumped lor Mann because he is so much more consistent than the other two. Burns ended up in the Liberal Government and Tillett became a TUC mandarin and a shameless spokesman for the collaborationist Mond-Turner proposals ...”

“... campaigner and local Labour Party member, read some of her poems, including a rumbustious reply to John Betjeman which she called ‘In Praise of Slough’ – ‘those bombs aren’t such a huge joke any more.’ The main session over, we were offered Judith Chernaik on Shelley’s feminism or Elma Dangerfield on Byron and Shelley or Marilyn Butler on the ...”

“... political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is not to be found in any particular scandal, nor in the sudden susceptibility of certain individuals to corruption. Contemporary sleaze ...”

“... If Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot had achieved Cabinet rank together in the 1960s, the United Kingdom would be in better shape now. ‘That is my truth,’ as Bevan used to say. ‘Now tell me yours.’ What have they in common, though, this leftist Gang of Three, the Englishman, the Welshman and the Scot, Bevan, his wife and his friend, all from such different backgrounds? They have similar opinions, of course: but what of their human and moral nature, their style of writing and speaking? It may be worth noting that all three are childless and parentful: all three have been devoted to Protestant Christian parents and have (to my regret) firmly rejected the faith of their fathers ...”