“... Sue Slipman, Polly Toynbee and Rosie Barnes among them – but even such a seasoned campaigner as John Cartwright. One reads their names and wonders how true believers in Elmer Gantry felt when the charisma wore off.Crewe and King talk of the Gang of Four in almost hushed tones as if they were giants still stalking the land. Yet the fact is that their ...”

“... the spirit of the new music in the same way that the voice of Mahalia Jackson identified Gospel. John Smith’s discography of Johnny Cash, who was resident in Memphis at the time and also benefited from Phillips’s expertise, contributes to the idea of a movement. Presley’s intelligence, however, has always been in doubt. Joe Esposito, his infamous ...”

“... Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have had no better champion since John Wayne. The nation’s youth have another icon on which to click. What makes his resuscitation the more beguiling is that New Labour’s project has been built on an emphatic rejection of Bennism. In 1981, backed by the hard Left in the unions and the ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of ...”

“... nuclear deterrent), were thought to be unpopular, and its changes were accepted by John Smith when he succeeded Kinnock as leader after the 1992 election. Smith was not a member of the soft left, however; nor did he anticipate New Labour. The party he led was still recognisably in the British ...”

“... in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much ...”

“... This book contains a collection of essays about biology, most of which have been published before, in varied and often inacessible places, together with a new concluding chapter on dialectics. The authors have at least four things in common: they are Harvard professors, they have made distinguished contributions to the theory of ecology and evolution, they are dialectical materialists, and they write with wit and insight ...”

“... is the prospect of a two-speed Europe, in which Britain would be consigned to the slow lane. John Major and Douglas Hurd believe Britain will be in control of the 1996 agenda, and dismiss the possibility that others any longer wish to move faster towards integration than they do. Therefore, they contend, the old model of fast and slow tracks is out of ...”

“... for blokes of whom he approves. Bill Clinton is ‘a great guy’, as is the Taoiseach John Bruton. Andrew Smith is ‘a nice guy’, and so is Guy Verhofstadt; Andrew Adonis is ‘a thoroughly nice guy’. John Hutton is also ‘a thoroughly nice guy’, while the footmen at ...”

“... Mrs Thatcher herself was dumped in 1990 and the personal style of government transformed by John Major, there has yet – apart from a very different attitude towards Europe – been any significant change in the conduct of economic and social policy or in the intention behind it. The collection of books and papers under review, most of which ...”

“... in the mid-Sixties. If Mr Major doesn’t watch out, their successors could easily do the same for John Smith in the mid Nineties. Why, the proprietor of the Sun and the News of the World may already be rummaging through his attic even as I write, in the hope of finding that long-discarded bust of ...”

“... The Extended Phenotype is a sequel to The Selfish Gene. Although Dawkins has aimed his second book primarily at professional biologists, he writes so clearly that it could be understood by anyone prepared to make a serious effort. The Selfish Gene was unusual in that, although written as a popular account, it made an original contribution to biology ...”

“... I think I can see what is breaking down in evolutionary theory – the strict construction of the modern synthesis with its belief in pervasive adaptation, gradualism and extrapolation by smooth continuity from causes of change in local populations to major trends and transitions in the history of life. A new and general evolutionary theory will embody this notion of hierarchy and stress a variety of themes either ignored or explicitly rejected by the modern synthesis ...”

“... Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s revolution, the original Labour moderniser,’ the blurb begins. With Labour under Blair ...”

“... such a position is lost neither on his enemies nor on Mandelson, who tasted internal exile under John Smith and did not relish it. Belatedly weary of his Cardinal Richelieu reputation and riled by taunts that he is a hollow man without personal beliefs, the response has been a 100,000-word credo to show he can be a real politician like his ...”