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“... among pre-election promises. This year, the Tories’ cap on refugee numbers has jousted with the home secretary’s proposals to remove the right of recognised refugees to remain in Britain unconditionally, to lock up more asylum seekers while their claims are considered, and to allow the return of unaccompanied children to their countries of origin. In ...”

“... a permanent party of principle; and their party tradition set particular store by honour and fame. Lord Holland’s were the first published reminiscences of a major politician, Brougham’s was the first full autobiography, and Lord John Russell’s the first broad-canvas memoir by a former prime minister. Even so, these ...”

“... forbad the drinking of milk’– tact not the booboo you madeat a dinner one time with Lord Halifax‘Have you ever been to India? I asked him’‘actually, Halifax said, I used to be viceroy’then the merry chortle the gurglethat was somehow old-fashioned and hilariouslike the way as Muldoon notedyou motored to places instead of drivingor more ...”

“... to work in newspapers, though for entirely different reasons. King, a nephew of Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), was attracted by the wealth and influence that his uncle derived from owning the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Times and a clutch of periodicals. Cudlipp, whose brothers Percy and Reg were already newspapermen, was attracted by the glamour ...”

“... designate’ to some of his future colleagues. On this occasion McNee is said to have met the late Lord Mountbatten for the first time, and Mountbatten is quoted as claiming that he himself had ‘got the job’ of Metropolitan Commissioner for McNee. Chapter Two (‘From Coppering to Command’) then takes us back to Glasgow, giving some account of McNee’s ...”

“... takes the queen out of court politics and into the popular arena, where she proves surprisingly at home. Throughout his compact, engaging book, Taylor emphasises ‘the agency of the queen’. She was never Melbourne’s puppet, and she did not become Disraeli’s either. In the process, we are made aware of the extreme oddity of Britain’s empire on the ...”

“... and his younger confederate, who actually fired the shot which killed a policeman, was spared. The Home Secretary who refused a reprieve was ‘an evil-looking cove called Maxwell Fyfe’ (others may prefer to remember him as the man who faced down Goering at Nuremberg). Ludovic Kennedy was stirred to write a play based on the case, Murder Story, which ran for ...”

“... the passing of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act and the publication in 1979 of a report to the Home Office by the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, chaired by the philosopher Bernard Williams, which advances a case for moral pluralism. The Labour-appointed committee found itself addressing a newly elected Conservative administration which ...”

“... only in Surrey. Nevertheless, it is still funny that Nancy’s aesthete Oxford friends, invited home for the weekend, should be ‘shaken like rats’ by Lord Redesdale (the father), told they were ‘hogs’, ‘sewers’ and ‘damned puppies’ (‘I’d rather take a housemaid shooting than you, ...”

“... Oh my God, how rich and powerful Lord Channon has become! There is his house in Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself suddenly as a copy of the blue room at the Amalienburg near Munich – baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no and all that ...”

“... the reasons for this have looked to ‘domestic ideology’, which in consigning women to the home foisted all the warmer emotions associated with family life on them. But what was at stake in these idealisations was not just a familial feminine ideal (which anyway long predated the 18th century), but the fate of altruistic emotions in a competitive ...”

“... collision of ancient and modern’. The story​ begins in the early months of 1596. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had been formed less than two years previously (they would become the King’s Men after the accession of James I in 1603). They were already the most popular troupe in town, with their leading actor Richard Burbage and their star comic ...”

“... disguised as a waiter. That should at least secure you the entrée.’ One of the boys is called Lord. It’s true that there was such a boy at Giggleswick School from whose prospectus I pinched some of the names, but he’s only so called in order to furnish the Headmaster, wandering about holding his empty coffee cup, with the blasphemous joke ‘...”

“... czar General Barry McCaffrey in 1996. ‘This is not a medicine. This is a cruel hoax.’ Our own Home Secretary endorsed this line after his son’s arrest for a drug offence in 1997. Ann ‘zero-tolerance’ Widdecombe is even more opposed to it (except, it seems, when used by Shadow Cabinet colleagues and other supposedly ‘educated, articulate ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”