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“... who had once been part of that drinking culture but had gone sober. One was Campbell. Another was John Reid, who gave up drink in 1994 after having acquired a reputation as a serious boozer. McBride effectively finished Reid’s political career in 2007 when he fed poison about Reid’s past to the papers. But why did Brown tolerate it? Even McBride seems ...”

“... Davis not muffed his lines is almost as tantalising as the question of what might have happened if John Smith had lived. Davis’s campaign had been showing signs of weakness, but the conference speeches decisively shifted the narrative, turning him into the politician who had over-reached and Cameron into the natural-born leader. A Davis-led Conservative ...”

“... quality in our relationship alive’. In his biography of the recently deceased Auden, Charles Osborne claimed that while at Oxford he had slept with Spender, at a period when the younger man was still a ‘verger’ – gang-speak for ‘virgin’. The allegation was indignantly denied. Nor was there any suggestion of a sexual relationship between Spender ...”

“... inequalities in wealth by giving an entire generation access to some capital of their own. George Osborne killed the scheme in January 2011.When the Child Trust Fund was introduced in 2005, the national debt was 33 per cent of GDP, a pound was worth $1.90/ €1.42, inflation was 1.6 per cent and GDP per capita was growing at 1.9 per cent. That year, the ...”

“... as Thackeray imagined it when, in Vanity Fair, he set the early prosperity of the Sedley and Osborne families there, and later made it the scene of the sale that followed John Sedley’s bankruptcy, the sale at which Becky Sharp was outbid by Captain Dobbin for Amelia’s little square piano. (Building began in ...”

“... classicus in the study of computing, robotics and futurism, and is discussed at length in both John Kelly and Steve Hamm’s Smart Machines and Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over.2 Watson won, easily. Its performance wasn’t perfect: it thought Toronto was in the US, and when asked about a word with the double meaning ‘stylish elegance, or students who all ...”

“... to the assessments that claimants had to undergo in order to receive disability benefits. As John Pring shows in The Department, these changes – and others that followed – would ‘lead to countless deaths of disabled people’.Many governments have talked up the number and significance of false claims. A decade before the Blenheim conference, Peter ...”

“... There’s been no serious suggestion of a boycott by players or fans. Despite the presence of John Terry and a Russian oligarch, the person who really spoiled the pictures of Chelsea celebrating their recent European Cup win was George Osborne, standing grinning among the officials. Ukraine’s Polish co-hosts are ...”

“... in Zoffany’s delightful conversation pieces. Think of Victoria and Albert, happily ensconced at Osborne, all Gemütlichkeit and Christmas trees, with Landseer and Winterhalter conveniently to hand to paint them. Think of George V and Queen Mary, an inseparable couple, who did so much to uphold decent family values in the rackety era of the Bright Young ...”

“... reflect the profession’ and who cheerfully support deficit fetishism. I doubt that Cameron or Osborne care two hoots about the deficit; nor do the editors of the financial press. Cameron and Osborne use the deficit to justify a drastic reshaping of the welfare state; the editors to ensure that their kind of people stay ...”

“... in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate ...”

“... about this is disappointing but not surprising. One can see why the Tories have a problem. George Osborne, last year, was franker than men in his position usually are when talking about the need for cuts, but there were signs in the polls that the electorate didn’t like it much, so the rhetoric has been wound down a little. ...”

“... but updating the story with the recent work of Colin Matthew, Roy Jenkins, Richard Shannon, John Vincent, Sarah Bradford and Stanley Weintraub. Essentially it’s dry-bones parliamentary history – elections, cabinets, reshuffles, bills, budgets, divisions, dissolutions – and its verdict on the falling out hardly deepens our understanding: ‘By the ...”

“... of an allusive dedication (but to whom?) or an introductory quotation from my favourite poem by John Donne, rehearsing the terms of restrained self-promotion in which to couch the perfect blurb. I was relieved to find that reflections of this nature still achieved a satisfactory standard of consecutive coherence as far as they went, but depressed to ...”

“... on the side of a bus, and before you know it you’ve promised a spending spree so lavish that John McDonnell is accusing you of being ‘reckless’. But something significant has happened along the way that may cause particular concern to traditional Conservative sympathisers in the business and financial sectors. The claim that politicians are ...”