Search Results

“... managed to reveal quite so many things that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet Pincher believes he never threatened the security of the state – that would be the work of a traitor, which is the way he described Snowden in a recent television ...”

“... circulation declined, notwithstanding its 1964 relaunch as the Sun, complete with the new Wilson-era slogan: ‘Born of the age we live in!’ When IPC finally decided to sell the Sun the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am ...”

“... Since then, a number of historians have tried their hand at the prosopography of the saints. Michael Goodich has attempted to draw ‘a profile of 13th-century sainthood’, André Vauchez has studied the later Middle Ages, and now two specialists in Italian history, Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, have surveyed the whole of Western Christendom from ...”

“... It was written in the 1950s and first published in 1964, as Hrabal’s second book in print. Michael Henry Heim’s English translation appeared in 1995, when Hrabal was 81. Old book? New book? Young book? Formal? Formless? A chore? A breeze? Somehow Hrabal makes nonsense of the categories.Zgustová quotes Hrabal reflecting on his aesthetics (she ...”

“... the Party took up at Blackpool last October will not be changed in any fundamental way and that Michael Foot and Denis Healey will therefore have to fight the next election on a programme closer to the French Communist Party’s than to that of any other important working-class party in the Western world. Labour has been losing support since the early ...”

“... 19 March. It got going just before 10 a.m. and lasted until nearly one o’clock. Anyone who knows Michael Heseltine knows that he is a rapid dispatcher of business, even by senior ministerial standards. To spend three hours wondering how to answer a couple of letters is blue-moonish, and speaks volumes about the concern to hide. ‘This was a long meeting by ...”

“... isn’t clear that British politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as such: ‘an acknowledgment of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from ...”

“... same side as their leader. Rather than acting as a vehicle for Bevan’s views, Tribune, edited by Michael Foot, described itself as leading the campaign against the H-bomb. Lee believed that the Bevanites’ desertion was responsible for the cancer that killed Bevan in 1960: ‘until their attacks began, he never had so much as a stomach ache,’ she wrote ...”

“... The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global reach and eyewitness ...”

“... would no more veto an honour for Edward Heath or Harold Macmillan than Tory dons would veto Harold Wilson. Even Michael Foot might have slipped through as a representative of the old order, a Thirties-ish, literary champion of the supremacy of Parliament, who caused offence mainly by mistaking the Cenotaph for the ...”

“... middle-aged, middle-class anxieties with the nine stories in Georgina Hammick’s Spoilt. Angus Wilson’s name has been mentioned in comparison, but these pieces have none of the acidity and satiric hardness of Wilson’s early short stories. Their sheen, style and deliberate under-statement are much nearer the New ...”

“... without maps. ‘Guilty but Insane’ was Ian Gilmour’s heading for his Spectator review of Michael Foot and Mervyn Jones, whose Suez book Guilty Men 1956 is still one of the best accounts of the collusion. The Spectator has often made trouble for the Tory leadership, with Iain Macleod’s bean-spiller on ‘The Magic Circle’ being the benchmark ...”

“... a vivid picture of the man whose character and career epitomise the post-war triumphs of MI5: Michael Bettaney. Poor Bettaney was off his rocker from an early age. Though he was clever enough to go to Oxford University, he could not contain his twin obsessions: Adolf Hitler and alcohol. Observers in Oxford pubs would ask him to be quiet when he clicked ...”

“... the first weeks of the new Labour Administration in 1964 there was a bitter wrangle between Harold Wilson and the Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Cromer. Cromer demanded an immediate rise in interest rates. Wilson replied that he had fought an election on economic expansion and low interest rates, and was inclined to ...”

“... invested in the War Loan, to protect their finances against any postwar Labour government. As Michael Smith describes, these problems were exacerbated by the budget cuts which followed the end of hostilities. In 1919, MI5’s annual grant dropped from £100,000 to £30,000, forcing it into unsavoury alliances with the political Right. It recruited Maxwell ...”