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“... has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in ...”

“... to reposition the party, and his two successors have been Thatcherites of the purest water. Michael Howard, of course, was not elected simply because he was a Thatcherite: he was elected because he is a bruiser who the party assumed could do more damage to the government than anyone else. In this sense, his election is purely cynical and ...”

“... of a trade that was facing new and unfamiliar challenges saw these young publishers as saviours. Michael Howard, Jonathan Cape’s vice-regent for ten years, entitled the last section of his 1971 history of the firm ‘Regeneration’. It opens with Maschler’s arrival and ends with his ascent – aged 37 – to the chairmanship. ...”

“... Since the early 1990s ministers have been more willing to criticise judges’ decisions: Michael Howard, David Blunkett and Theresa May are prominent examples. As home secretary, May falsely claimed that a judge had refused to deport someone on the grounds they were very attached to their cat. This increase has been matched by a decline in the ...”

“... in the Times of 30 January 1980 from the Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford, Michael Howard. In his letter, Professor Howard criticised current government policy on civil defence, and argued that ‘Civil Defence on a scale sufficient to give protection to a substantial number of the population in ...”

“... tanks didn’t counsel prudence. In the run-up to the war, RUSI’s director of military science, Michael Codner (King’s via the US Naval War College in Rhode Island), described it as ‘an intervention of choice designed to make the world on balance a safer and better place’. Britain was involved, Codner wrote, because ‘one of successive British ...”

“... In all the larger departments, particularly those deemed ideologically crucial (see John Patten or Michael Howard), the juggernaut rolls on and Mr Major could not stop it even if he wished. Nor can he suppress the seemingly unconstrained ambition of those around him, for his success is a product of the same political system which they intend shall promote ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... of a ‘national crisis’. On 1 April 1996, the Monday of Easter week, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, made a surprise statement full of foreboding about imminent IRA violence and the need for immediate legislation to prevent it. Various lacunae in the law had been discovered which it was now suddenly deemed essential to ...”

“... such as Prescott, Blunkett and Hain merged into the Blairite mass or, like Margaret Beckett, Michael Meacher and Kinnock himself, became bit players on the political stage, Cook remained a prominent and prickly reminder of the electoral calculations that had won Blair the leadership in 1994. In this respect, he was undoubtedly helped by being banished to ...”

“... historians of British art have offered us two different Hogarths, with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings ...”

“... made little attempt to exploit the Home Office for electoral mobilisation. The rot began with Michael Howard, who was resolute in his attempt to make Labour appear ‘soft’ on crime, immigration etc. In their determination not to be ‘outflanked’ on the right Blair and Straw went with him all the way. Since Alastair Campbell’s genius did not ...”

“... version of a constitution expressed as a framework of fundamental law.’ Home secretaries from Michael Howard on have expressed much the same view, although not usually in such good prose. What Grayling is now taking the opportunity to accomplish is what almost all of them – Howard, Reid and Blunkett prominent ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of ...”

“... He had the patriarchal scholar’s satisfaction of receiving a festschrift, organised by Sir Michael Howard, but never achieved the university distinction his attainments probably merited. When in 1946 Swinton at last relinquished what Danchev calls his ‘limpet grip’ on the Oxford History of War Chair in which he had lazed since 1925, Liddell ...”