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“... settle for being remembered for what was said to them as opposed to what they said themselves. David Livingstone went through hell before arriving at Lake Tanganyika in October 1871, but his stories about that journey would never enter the language the way Stanley’s would, when he caught up with him at Ujiji. Fourteen years earlier Livingstone had given ...”

“... might be a recognition of that fact. If, however, his resignation is simply to make way for David Davis, then nothing has been learned. The Conservatives would do well to think harder next time: the old xenophobic parochialism which once did so well for them has weakened as the Conservative working class has disappeared. This culture’s disarray can be ...”

“... from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now. The extent of the continued underfunding of the public ...”

“... Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper ...”

“... Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on. Many a crusade has been smothered by the great big yawn of the British public. Norton-Taylor is not and never was Tam Dalyell’s or anyone else’s tame journalist. On the contrary, he started by being ...”

“... out to be a Spanish chef capable and indeed only too pleased to produce delicious pre-Elizabeth David food for the ravenous Radletts.13 February. ‘God’s honour’ we used to swear as boys. This remembered in the middle of an acute attack of arthritis pain this morning when I’m marooned on the sofa, cold, thirsty but unable to move. ‘I don’t know ...”

“... chins thrust forward, as if on their way to a Royal Marine assault course. Next appears Robin Cook, who is led aside by Alastair Campbell and rehearsed in conspiratorial whispers about what he is to say to the reptiles waiting across the road. Cook, whom I’ve never met, gives me a quick, suspicious ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...”

“... As I write this, the Liberal MP David Alton is about to introduce a Bill changing the upper time limit on legal abortions from 28 weeks to 18. If he succeeds, more women will be forced to give birth against their will, and more will be obliged to give birth to children already known to be severely handicapped. Whether he succeeds will be determined by a House of Commons where 13 out of every 16 MPs belong to the sex that does not get pregnant and does not, traditionally, take on the main responsibility of childcare ...”

“... the electoral success of the Labour Party. This is not a view that Foster and Woolfson would take. David Howell is concerned with a similar theme: how can we reconcile nationality and socialism? Howell, prompted by the Falklands War (and understandably made more depressed by ‘the sodden summer of 1985’), has tried to answer the question by an examination ...”

“... first saw the photograph in Theodora Fitzgibbon’s A Taste of Scotland – evidently a regional cook-book with touristic overtones. But the whimsy about not believing in the mainland is an invented one, virtually signposted as such, and sounds as though it emanates from the poet rather than the photographer – a poet coyly aware of playing with tourist ...”

“... The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has ...”

“... Social Chapter, followed by the restoration of the Civil Service unions to GCHQ. Then came Robin Cook’s declaration in favour of a landmine ban – achieved by the simple, but effective, technique of failing to inform the Ministry of Defence in advance. Then there was the cancellation of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay Khadka, by ...”

“... image of itself, particularly that of the women: she dresses exotically and sexily, can’t cook, has no man, knows about magic and folk healing, gets a job. She rapidly becomes an object of fear and desire, is reputed to be a witch. Her son Billy is mercilessly bullied at school; like his mother, he is perceived as the outsider, the interloper; he can ...”

“... future of socialism may lie more with William Morris than with Herbert Morrison,’ Robin Cook said in 1987. Morris died over ninety years ago, but remains wise and relevant for his insistence on combining social justice with a respect for nature. Can the Left recover his kind of vision, and can it win the support of its fellow-citizens? Or is the ...”