“... Stephanopoulos describes how important physical proximity to the president was – having your office a few yards nearer to the Oval Office than the next person was crucial – and he lets us know that he got close. This was more like a medieval ...”

“... in a cabinet reshuffle. It was announced, not to Parliament but by press release, that his office was not to be filled and that his department was to become part of the Department for Constitutional Affairs, headed by a newly appointed minister, Lord Falconer. Of the expected ministry of justice there was no ...”

“... inconsistency of allowing Strasbourg through a door that is at present firmly closed to the home judiciary has driven many before Lord Howe to call for incorporation of the Convention almost as though it were a simple matter of logic. Writing in this paper some months ago, Stephen Sedley considered the off-the-shelf solution of incorporation of the ...”

“... Brexit she had advanced in her conference speech threatened the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic she had no choice but to retreat. The Withdrawal Agreement she eventually produced, alongside the infamous ‘backstop’ (in the event of a breakdown in negotiations between the UK and EU, the backstop would allow an open ...”

“... it; he never strictly did. As for the events she was intimately connected with – Northern Ireland in 1969, counter-espionage in the 1970s, counter-subversion in the early and mid-1980s, counter-terrorism in the late 1980s, and everything, one presumes, as Director-General between December 1991 and April 1996 – who knows whether she is ...”

“... best.The truly momentous event on 5 May was Sinn Féin’s victory in the Assembly elections in Northern Ireland. As Newsnight’s unusually honest and assiduous reporter Lewis Goodall put it in a clip widely shared on social media, this was a result that the North’s political constitution was once supposed to make impossible. It had been ...”

“... of the Constitution Unit at University College London.Tom Bingham at that point held the office of senior law lord. Seniority among the law lords had historically been determined solely by length of service. The most inspired achievement of Derry Irvine as Tony Blair’s lord chancellor was the creation in June ...”

“... reach, went on the programme anyway and broke the taboo, which Mackay abandoned when he took up office in 1987. Pickles still seems unable to understand that it is not talking to the media but the stupid things he says to them that makes him notorious. With the exception nowadays of a few able solicitors, all judges are ...”

“... the less accessible parts of the non-European world. More recently, she stayed closer to her Irish home and investigated the religious and social divisions of Northern Ireland. In this book she turns her attention to the non-European populations of two British cities, Bradford and Birmingham, and there confronts the ...”

“... Institute of British Architects hosted a public meeting at which various contenders for the new office of London mayor were invited to argue their case for election. If the event remains memorable, it’s thanks largely to the Conservative candidate, Lord Archer, who betrayed no inkling of the perjury charges that would ...”

“... It wasn‘t a random juxtaposition of places: the Rev. Hazlitt’s family were from the North of Ireland, and at some level my interest in his son’s writings must issue from a recognition that their combative Whig mentality and natural jouissance are rooted far back in the Ulster Enlightenment, especially in the work of Francis Hutcheson, the Ulster-Scots ...”

“... to the traditional stupidity of the British ruling class are dispelled by an acquaintance with the Home Office papers.’ In fact, Thompson mused, you could write a convincing history of English radicalism as it was warped by espionage. Government spies penetrated and provoked, infiltrated and informed with unbelievable ...”

“... by J.B. Priestley, ‘Underground’, an adulterer bent on escape to voluptuous Brazil boards the Northern Line. At Hampstead everyone else exits; but at the next station, a Golders Green of the imagination, dead souls crowd in and the train trundles him away to the underworld. In A Word Child, surely the best of Iris Murdoch’s non-magical novels, a civil ...”

“... sections of the population; in the 1880s and 1890s, when the Liberals converted to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland, and tried to end the undivided authority of the imperial Parliament in Westminster; in 1910, when two elections were fought over the powers of the House of Lords; in 1914, when a ...”

“... Smith, a former Tory Party Treasurer, admitted the payments and promptly resigned as a junior Northern Ireland Minister. Hamilton denied everything to everyone. He told Michael Heseltine that he had had no financial relationship with Greer – a lie direct. He clung to office for ...”