“... David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables in this country: those accused of committing a crime. It will strip away safeguards that have taken centuries to accrue, and alienate criminal suspects further from society as a whole ...”

“... and private selves. Mead seemed closer to the mark.The White House​ Correspondents’ Dinner is held every spring in the subterranean ballroom of the Washington Hilton. The blue lights make you think for a moment you are several fathoms under an ocean. In 1997 there were 260 tables, each set for ten people, and a dais where the presidential party would ...”

“... char-acter roles if he’d allowed himself to play them. And I think he still wanted to but was held back, as he’d been all his life, by too strong a sense of self-preservation. 29 May. A biker delivers some proofs from PFD, and as I’m signing for them, asks what’s my opinion of Cyril Connolly and why is it he’s less well thought of ...”

“... been dismissed. In 1937 the Nazis staged the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. (Salomon, David Foenkinos imagines in his novel, ‘positions herself on the side of the despised artists’.) In 1938, she submitted a piece for an anonymous fine arts competition; having picked it as the winner, the jury panicked when they discovered it was by a Jewish ...”

“... granted that the establishment wanted to dominate the working classes. Studies by two academics, David Torrance and Jonathan Schneer, are aimed at a popular audience. Torrance focuses on high politics and elites, on the dubious basis that politicians and the middle classes are ‘more inclined to record their experiences than striking railwaymen, printers ...”

“... of the lobby are under an obligation to keep secret the fact that such meetings are held and to avoid revealing the sources of their information.’Younger members chafed, of course. The etiquette seemed to us as medieval as the Groom of the Stole. We itched for a more open dialogue, in which statements would be on the record and the speakers ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... Kennan and William Fulbright, the pragmatic realist tradition in American diplomatic thought held that it was necessary to consider the consequences of ideas and had an outlook characterised by a humane, cosmopolitan restraint in foreign and military policy. It’s still the best alternative to Clinton’s exceptionalist faith. Clinton’s​ outlook ...”

“... is the most interesting, however, and here Tempest more or less follows the philosopher David Sedley’s argument in his essay ‘The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius’ (1997), which demolishes ‘the belief, endemic among historians of the period, that, whatever his formal affiliations may have been, Brutus was in spirit, like so many Romans, a ...”

“... about his second film, Le Petit Soldat, he invoked Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai, which David Thomson has seen as ‘deconstructing’ film noir. Une femme est une femme reminded him of Lubitsch’s supposed ‘failure’, Design For Living, and Richard Quine’s decidedly minor My Sister Eileen. Godard treated Hollywood as a kind of conceptual ...”

“... Protestant people, to use their weapons if Britain tried to force constitutional change on them. David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, now hailed in many quarters as a ‘moderate’, was himself a supporter of Vanguard, the militant Unionist body which in the early Seventies had links with Loyalist paramilitaries. After the abolition of the ...”

“... the death from heatstroke in an Iraq military camp of Private Jason Smith in August 2003 was held – rightly – to be a matter for investigation by the assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire, into whose territory the body had been returned. Smith had had to endure shade temperatures in excess of 50ºC without air-conditioning. He had been sick in the ...”

“... us more about the practical side: about how Jay, Durbin and the others came together, how they held together, and how they gained influence. New ideas will not be enough. Labour will also need historians to help in the search for a better image. This is not just a matter of red roses: the Party will need to rethink what (if anything) it means by ...”

“... sense.’ He also attended the first meeting of the National Assembly of the Scottish Convention, held in Glasgow in March 1947. The argument, as Henderson pressed it in an article for the Voice of Scotland, was that Gaelic civilisation could be defended only by ‘energetic political action which will make life liveable in the glens and along the shores of ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”