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“... the capitals of Europe. When I took on these attitudes I was writing a book full of admiration for John Clare as a local poet, and I was learning to admire Constable as, principally, a local painter. But to be modern was to be metropolitan; and to be a ‘local’ anything in the 1960s, even for musicians in Liverpool, was to have missed the bus to London. So ...”

“... guardsmen and their horses in the royal parks. A missile fired from a truck and narrowly missing John Major’s cabinet in Downing Street was met with astonishment as much as alarm. The IRA had come to learn that one bomb in London had more impact than ten in Northern Ireland. Yet since it concentrated on commercial ...”

“... and conservation. The difference here is that 80 per cent of the works are off site – in 10 Downing Street, British embassies and any number of less grand places. It was pointed out to us that the collection is not principally for the private delectation of ambassadors and ministers: works tend to be hung in rooms which see considerable, and quite ...”

“... Syria has for now turned into the war that never happened thanks to the gaffe that never was. Once John Kerry let slip that there was something Assad could do to head off a military strike – agree to international oversight of his chemical arsenal – the stalled march to war became a headlong retreat. Obama appears to have found a way out of the hole he had dug for himself, with a helping hand from Putin ...”

“... herself contributed. Her two volumes of political autobiography, The Path to Power (1995) and The Downing Street Years (1993), are compulsive reading, a continuation of political warfare by other means, and a combination of valuable postwar history and adroit rewriting of the national past and her own past. The longer that the current Conserv-ative Party ...”

“... are usually bad fathers, bad citizens, wife-beaters even. But what does that matter to Yerofeev, downing bottle after bottle as he writes his prose poem, while laying cables between Sheremetyevo and Lobnya in the autumn of 1969?Stephen Mulrine adapted the dramatised version of the novel, Moskva-Petushki, for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, from where it ...”

“... however, it isn’t clear how much we can read into them. Local elections in the last days of John Major’s government did, it’s true, accurately predict the outcome of the 1997 general election, but that is very unusual. In any case, comparisons between Major’s last days and the position of the present government don’t really hold up. Labour’s ...”

“... expert described it as ‘balance sheet manipulation with a smiley face’.)When Cameron left Downing Street in 2016, he walked through the revolving door he had once promised to close. He became chairman of the advisory board to Afiniti, a US data firm, and a consultant for the biotech company Illumina. He also registered with Washington Speakers Bureau ...”

“... might now have the regal expansiveness of Paris if the Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones and John Webb drew up for Charles I had been built. Then our prime minister might be living not in the modest decency of Downing Street but in something more like the Hôtel Matignon. Passing it and other grand houses given over to ...”

“... length by Major, how is the recent history of the Conservative Party to be written and rewritten? John Campbell’s biography addresses this question with admirable erudition, insight and dispassion. It sets out to make the case for Heath in much the same way that Ben Pimlott’s biography did for Wilson last year: that is, not to argue for a favourable ...”

“... chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, would still be blogging in his underground lair, instead of using Downing Street as a launchpad for an assault on the establishment – including the Conservative Party itself, of which he is conspicuously not a member. In that alternate universe, another radical and not quite recognisably Tory disruptor would be at May’s ...”

“... very plausibly) to St Francis of Assisi that Margaret Thatcher quoted on the steps of 10 Downing Street on her first day as prime minister, 4 May 1979: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.’ Thatcher had just called on the queen and no doubt wrote the words as an aide-memoire on the short drive back through St James Park from Buckingham ...”

“... months, it was only England that Boris spoke for, and spoke to, at those teatime briefings from Downing Street. Meanwhile, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland did their own devolved things. Drivers crossing the Severn into Wales faced courteous police questions. Nicola Sturgeon declined to rule out controls on the Scottish border if there were a fresh ...”

“... which uses the Upper House as a clerk might use Tippex. The ‘sober second thought’ which Sir John Macdonald, the first Canadian premier (and a notable inebriate) attributed to senates is largely the stuff of legend. To see what lessons may be learned from abroad, Meg Russell has examined seven upper houses in modern democracies. Rather oddly, she omits ...”

“... in one day, or the current Prime Minister’s son is found paralytic in Leicester Square after downing many pints, it is seen as a manly rite of passage. Beer Street is as wholesomely British as it was in Hogarth’s day (not so Drug Lane). AA rests on mysterious foundations. Given the inviolable ‘tradition’ of anonymity (‘the spiritual foundation of ...”