“... implications for political democracy of government by unelected experts. In 1971, the lawyer Lewis Powell Jr, later appointed to the Supreme Court by Nixon, wrote an influential memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce urging corporate executives to enlist in what he described as an ideological war in which freedom, defined as free-market economics, was ...”

“... over Westlands were attributed to those civil servants such as Mr Bernard Ingham and Mr Charles Powell whom Mrs Thatcher sees many times each day. Isn’t this something we should be concerned about? Three decades after Crichel Down, however, all the House of Commons and the country seem to do is to shrug its collective shoulders. Part of the explanation is ...”

“... least, to my seniors’ appreciation of it. They were as different, almost, as Cocteau and Baden-Powell. One was picturesque and picaresque, Africa Dances: A Book about West African Negroes, published by Geoffrey Gorer in 1935 when he was 30, after a rather Waugh-like tour of French and British territories: he had been guided by Féral Benga, a ballet dancer ...”

“... than her own, and its even more terrible consequences.’ Clearly, a dreadful experience. But Michael Shelden, George Orwell’s biographer and in Spurling’s view one of those responsible for disparaging Sonia, has a slightly different take on the event. Interviewing her sister and half-brother, he claims that fearing for her life in the struggle with ...”

“... when Parliament was sitting, I believe there might have been a different gut reaction. Once Michael Foot had struck an attitude, ‘loyalty to Michael’ became an element in a situation where the notion of actual gunfire in the South Atlantic was surrealist fantasy. People had some vague scenario, at worst, of a ...”

“... are in Shead; the Angus Morrison unpublished chapter made available to Shead and the Anthony Powell memoir which prefaced Shead’s book are re-quarried. And Motion never cites references – a major irritation of this biography without bibliography. Constant’s life-story is told with gusto, nevertheless. The brilliant conversationalist and punster ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... of them might have weakened under Derby’s persuasion, but Cranborne, rather like Enoch Powell in the Thorneycroft-Powell-Birch resignations of 1958, implacably drove them on.’ On Gladstone’s prime ministerial management of his cabinet: ‘While it is difficult to believe that he emulated Attlee’s laconicism ...”

“... a magnificent folly, a film made frenziedly, a fabrication of breakdowns and benzedrine. Much as Powell and Pressburger re-created India in Pinewood for Black Narcissus, GWTW represents the triumph of artifice, the South of the 1860s concocted on a Hollywood lot. While the book was an ante-modernist throwback, a 1930s riposte to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the ...”

“... It is clear that Benn has the same sentimental attitude to Parliament that we associate with Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. But ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’ is one of the polite fictions of modern Britain: it permits the executive, judiciary and bureaucracy to do whatever they wish – usually in secret ...”

“... Apollo in 1976. In France, ‘Curval’s name is as well-known as Frank Herbert’s in America or Michael Moorcock’s in Britain.’ Brave Old World transports us to ‘Marcom’ – the EEC as it will have developed in the late 21st century. Britain is apparently still in. But since the whole action takes place where France used to be, we are not yet the ...”

“... in 1982 after the invasion of the Falkland Islands, don’t happen very often. More recently, Michael Howard’s reluctance as home secretary to accept blame for the failures of the prison service introduced some new distinctions into the concept of ministerial responsibility. In 1995 Howard sacked Derek Lewis, the director-general of the prison ...”

“... long.Margaret: Yes. Very.Plomley died in harness in 1985 after 1786 episodes. He was succeeded by Michael Parkinson, twenty years younger and an experienced TV chat show host, who found the experience bruising and left after two years. In his autobiography, Parkinson says that Plomley’s widow, Diana (who’d wanted Plomley’s old friend John Mortimer to ...”

“... Geoffrey Fisher, called on Macmillan to tell him that whatever he did, he must not appoint Michael Ramsey as his successor, adding that he knew Ramsey well, had indeed been his headmaster at Repton. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ Macmillan replied. ‘You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.’ Some years ...”

“... A mystique of language for its own sake is the power source and the danger of Modernism. Michael Schmidt’s five American poets avoid (the best of their work avoids) both abstractions. The language has a life of its own and a life in relation to a recognisable real world, as in James McMichael’s ‘Compline’: Gudique is the chastening. She is ...”