“... and sense of fun, less than the most listened-to member of Cabinet. The man she admires most is Michael Foot, while transmitting her satisfaction at his gradual education in the responsibilities of government, and consequent adoption of policies very different from those advocated in savage criticism of Barbara Castle in the late Sixties. But he, above ...”

“... Until 1 January 1996, it seemed as if three mighty powers – American science, General Motors and the State of California – would bring about the most momentous change in personal transport since the carriage went horseless. Now, it seems, ‘Ev1’ (Electric Vehicle One, or the ‘electric turkey’ as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard ...”

“... and Jewish, view is that he also wishes to sleep with his mother. The Devil then, and the powers the Devil may take, receive their dismissal at the hands of psychiatry and neuroscience. The landscape of the double turns out to be the topography of the human brain, both left and right, high and low, and the double and the nature of the double no longer ...”

“... that Congress had rejected half a century earlier: an international organisation with binding powers to settle disputes. The US saw an opportunity also to create stronger trade obligations in those areas of particular interest to its own corporations, in services (banking, law, management consultancy etc) and intellectual property (copyrights and ...”

“... well-recognised by Babbage, but he seems never to have attempted a theoretical account of its powers. This is partly explicable from the physical nature of the thing. It was, or would have been, a stupendous mass of interconnecting parts, which posed countless challenges simply for it to move efficiently. Machinery adapts itself to mathematical thought ...”

“... of these for yourselves.’ Canadians and Australians could say much the same: the entrenched powers of their provinces and states remain the lynchpins of the remarkably successful federal systems bequeathed by their former colonial masters (the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the more centralised Indian constitution). But in the UK itself? Scarcely ...”

“... Faced with the prospect of representing him as a king with no idea how to use his residual powers, Nicolson ended up following the royal household’s advice that he produce a ‘mythological’ George, the modest father of his people. Jane Ridley’s new biography pushes back against the idea that nothing lay behind the imposing façade of George’s ...”

“... which scenario is the most likely, yet the analysis they provide casts doubts on all of them. Michael Crick’s Militant is chiefly concerned with the two alternative Labour Party projections and in my judgment effectively knocks on the head the ‘mainstream’ hope. The final sentence – ‘There is little that the Labour Party can do about it ...”

“... If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it follows that the enemy of Michael Howard is my hero. So awful was Howard’s long reign at the Home Office that many liberals sought democratic relief from the most blatantly undemocratic section of the establishment: the judiciary. It was the strange sound of Law Lords denouncing Howard’s preposterous insistence that ‘prison works’ and the widespread jubilation at his many snubbings in the courts that led to liberal hosannas for the judges ...”

“... doctrine of Just and Unjust Wars, as set out by a distinguished philosopher of the American Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak ...”

“... tide’ and faced a stiffer challenge. ‘Rise to thy destiny!’ she exhorted. ‘Awake thy powers!’ His father, Squire Haggard (a crusty fellow, but otherwise unlike the old villain invented by Michael Green), had viewed him as fit only to be a greengrocer. The post found for him was that of junior aide to the ...”

“... an elaborate trap. Using actors pretending to be businessmen, the programme-makers approached Sir Michael Grylls, long-standing Tory MP for North-West Surrey, and introduced themselves as agents for a firm which wanted to smuggle art treasures out of Russia. As a cover for their enterprise, they explained, they wanted to buy a government agency, preferably ...”

“... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...”

“... justify all of Naipaul’s intensities and obsessions. These eight pieces – a long one on the Michael X murders in Trinidad, five on Argentina and Uruguay, one on the Congo and one on Joseph Conrad – are held together by Conradian preoccupations. They represent an ‘effort of thought and sympathy’, an effort that ‘does not stop with the aspect of ...”

“... wrong with it. After all, an institution which manages to upset Mr Tony Benn, Lady Falkender, Mr Michael Meacher, Mr Joe Haines, the editor of the Spectator and the sub-editors of the Daily Express cannot be all bad; and from there it is a small step to conclude that it must be all, or nearly all, good. The step is a dangerous one, however, and readers of ...”