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“... to consider these two iconic female rulers together’, according to its curator, Andrea Clarke. Elizabeth and Mary were obsessed with each other. Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII; her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor. While most of Europe thought of Elizabeth as a bastard – how could a daughter of ...”

“... South and now in the House of Lords, is the brother of someone I went to school with. Simon Clarke, the Tory MP for Middlesbrough South, went to my school – when I was eight, I knew him as an officious prefect. The Sedgefield constituency, at its Hurworth end, adjoins the Richmond constituency, almost unbrokenly Tory since 1886, whose MP is Rishi ...”

“... get any rapport with these people,’ he told her. She told him to wait, according to Gerald Clarke in his 1988 biography of Capote. She knew it could be done. On Christmas Day, Clifford Hope, a local lawyer, and his wife, Dolores, invited Capote and Lee to dinner. Mrs Hope had set a trend: Once you got over the high-pitched voice, why, you didn’t ...”

“... nicks the jelly, it’s all commandingly impersonal. The servicing of ‘the soft machine’ (as William Burroughs called the body) proceeds to anaesthetising muzak, and tomorrow or the next day my mother, only a little sore, will start to see the world again through her new synthetic lens. For me, there will just be a faint twinge, thinking how this keyhole ...”

“... excuse of rearmament for the Korean war, Macmillan’s future policy study, masterminded by Otto Clarke (Charles Clarke’s father), envisaged that 8½ per cent of GNP should continue to be spent on defence and other overseas activities. All that had actually happened in the interim is that room had had to be made in the ...”

“... institutions that enjoyed wide public support. She was, for example, much less ready than Kenneth Clarke to reform the NHS. The enforced sale of council housing was part of her original programme, but it was assumed to be risk-free and had long been contemplated by the party. It was the success of the privatisation – a word she did not particularly like ...”

“... estate, and her final defiant infatuation at the age of 80 with the strapping second-rate actor William Augustus Conway. Hester’s mother had taught her only child ‘to play a thousand pretty Tricks, & tell a Thousand Pretty Stories and repeat a Thousand pretty verses to divert’ her violent, irascible and elegant father. ‘Rakish men seldom make tender ...”

“... members of the so-called Democracy Taskforce set up by the Tories in opposition and headed by Ken Clarke, have over the past decade proposed various means of ironing out post-devolutionary wrinkles in the British political system. So too has the McKay Commission (2012-13), chaired by a former clerk of the House of Commons. Meanwhile there have been major ...”

“... Dems, of course, have no ministerial experience at all; of the Tories in the cabinet only Kenneth Clarke has had a significant ministerial career (William Hague’s at the Welsh Office was brief). Blair’s first ministry was equally inexperienced, but it never seemed as lightweight, and it came to office in much more ...”

“... to detail. How much could a person expect to be paid for the upkeep of a marsupial in 1611? William Walker, keeper of fowl at the menagerie in St James’s Park, was paid five shillings a month to care for England’s first recorded opossum. What was the customs duty on an emu in 1801? Joseph Banks narrowly avoided customs duty ad valorem – duty based ...”

“... name for my own blueberry-loving toddler than the jubilant More Fruit. In 1603 the antiquary William Camden cited the new practice among the gentry of using surnames as first names, pointing to Grevill Varney, Bassingburne Gawdy and Calthorp Parker: ‘Although many dislike it, for the great inconvenience that will ensue … neverthelesse it seemeth to ...”

“... massive research (or ‘detection’) covering its subject’s life up to the publication of Micah Clarke, no more than a year after Holmes’s first bow in A Study in Scarlet. We learn that Alfred Aloysius Watson was five years senior to Conan Doyle at Stonyhurst; that the eminent Sir Patrick Heron Watson was almost his contemporary in the Edinburgh Medical ...”

“... depended. Hennessy shows how one or two of the mandarins – primarily the excellent Otto Clarke – identified the problem from the beginning. The Labour leadership – Bevin, Dalton, Attlee and Cripps – came to realise it too late, without having any idea how to solve it. Hennessy contrasts the short-sighted pragmatism of the British civil ...”

“... that will require some shifting of ground. The Tories would love to escape any blame for Iraq, and William Hague does seem to have learned some lessons. Iain Duncan Smith has emerged as an unexpected champion of social solidarity: a major advance in that wing of the Conservative Party. And for whatever reason, whether principle or political expediency, the ...”