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“... My Observer colleague Neal Ascherson – present in this anthology with an exemplary piece on Ken Livingstone – once observed that the task of the literary editor is to ruin the next generation of writers. In diverting them from what they think they should be doing to what he thinks they should be doing, he had better believe that it is a far, far ...”

“... and over-engineered.Last November Bob Kiley, the Commissioner of Transport for London appointed by Ken Livingstone, and like him an opponent of the Government’s PPP scheme, wrote to the chairman of London Transport. His letter deals mainly with doubts about the performance regime London Underground Limited (LUL) has developed to monitor the ...”

“... of an Oxford degree in philosophy and theology. He worked as a policy adviser on human rights to Ken Livingstone, then mayor of London, before founding DeepMind in 2010 with Demis Hassabis, a maths prodigy and computer games programmer turned neuroscientist, and Shane Legg, another neuroscience postdoc. In 2014 the company was acquired by Google, making ...”

“... There was solid ecological opposition from lovers of Oxleas Wood and other green spaces, but Ken Livingstone believed in the necessity of a Thames Gateway Bridge. His successor as mayor of London, as might be expected, brushed the project aside, in favour of an Emirates chairlift taking off from the Millennium Dome, a garden bridge folly, and a reef ...”

“... anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the GLC. One day, he had found himself taking the Underground in the company of a Tory MP. The arriving train was heavily congested and the unaccustomed Tory – who may or may not have been Alan Clark ...”

“... towards the lipid ooze of elected power is surprisingly common among democratic politicians. As Ken Livingstone’s 1987 memoir put it, If Voting Changed Anything They’d Abolish It. Livingstone was first elected to Parliament that year, having detected in ostentatious disdain for elected office a good wheeze for ...”

“... Sarkozy was president of France, Hu Jintao was general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Ken Livingstone was mayor of London, MySpace was the biggest social network, and the central bank interest rate in the UK was 5.5 per cent. It is sometimes said that the odds you could get on Leicester winning the Premiership in 2016 was the single most ...”

“... motorway, was aborted by Boris Johnson: it was too closely associated with the former mayor, Ken Livingstone. Thames Gateway is a geographical area and a philosophy for which Johnson has no enthusiasm. Boris champions the Eagle comic wheeze of an airstrip-island at the mouth of the river, out beyond Sheppey. I reported to Ballard on the way the ...”

“... she is. Later, you get a load of the babe stalking through the African jungle as though she beat Livingstone to it ... About every other minute she wrings her hands in ecstasy and says, “what divine natives! what divine morning glories!” Brother, your brow goes up ... is this something from The Philadelphia Story?’ In her biography of Orson ...”

“... fief of the Right; Rome, where Fini’s ex-Fascists are the largest party; or even London, where Ken Livingstone will never sweep Westminster or Kensington. Bismarck’s nightmare has come true. Berlin is going to be the most left-wing capital in Europe. The electoral profile of Berlin is, of course, only one index of the kind of metropolis it is likely ...”

“... is probably irreparable. But as Roy Porter reminds us, we did have some passing fun with the GLC. Livingstone and friends may have annoyed the tabloids and ultimately ensured their own demise, but for a while County Hall added greatly to the gaiety of the capital and its inhabitants. One policy after another was designed to enrage No-Society-Thatcher. Fares ...”