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“... with their knowledge of current affairs and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then ...”

“... a seat on Lambeth Council. I had worked for two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States ...”

“... Jeremy Corbyn, however maladroit and out of step with the party’s rebranding since the era of Michael Foot, is the darling of the growing Labour membership, and that his performance in the general election of 2017 vastly exceeded the party’s expectations. For all that the Labour Party has tried to exploit Remainer discontent with the May government’s ...”

“... The American Military Adventure in Iraq (the most bearable of these excruciating war volumes), Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s Cobra II, George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate, Peter Galbraith’s The End of Iraq, and now Woodward: these books and many others present their versions of what went wrong, aim for a culprit, and hope that a firing or a ...”

“... but that’s because we have a monarchy which is not only a religion but a popular cult: it’s Michael Jackson as well as Runcie. The younger royals instinctively understand that they are a sort of super pop-star, and, while they may occasionally complain about it, the fact is that, as any pop star must, they court tabloid attention, are indeed largely ...”

“... Tory heads as they contemplate an open appeal (as opposed to coded ones) to the Tony Martin/Enoch Powell vote. They have held off, well aware that this approach will put off at least as many voters as it puts on. So what are the Tories for? Nobody seems to know. At least New Labour knows what it’s for: to win elections. It is these longish-term trends that ...”

“... But nothing availed against the combined hostility of the prosecutor, Brian Leary, and the judge, Michael Argyle QC. The jury convicted, and the accused were jailed. They were bailed pending appeal, and in November 1971 their appeals were allowed on the ground that Argyle had failed to give the jury an adequate direction on the meaning of obscenity, in ...”

“... of drunkenness. All this encouraged talk of eugenics and sterilising the feeble-minded. Baden-Powell set up the Boy Scouts because so much was wrong with society. Poor boys stole; middle-class ones knew no danger. A woman drowned in the Hampstead Ponds because the men nearby couldn’t swim. Boys’ teeth were so bad that they couldn’t eat hard biscuits ...”

“... poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done in the name of our nation, in the name of history. Inside we were cleansing history, concentrating on those aspects of our past which ...”

“... government like Douglas Hurd and William Waldegrave as well as her private secretary Charles Powell, and the late Yehudi Avner, who was Israel’s ambassador in London between 1983 and 1988. When she became prime minister a number of pressing questions faced Thatcher at home and abroad: the economy, the unions, Ulster, Rhodesia, the Cold War in what ...”

“... with especial pride. After some London dockers and meat-porters had turned out to support Enoch Powell, thus convincing many fastidious snobs that the proles were beyond all help or consideration, we organised a ‘Confront the racists’ mass meeting where the main address was given by Terry Barrett, a Tilbury stevedore with a voice like a foghorn. He ...”

“... superstate, and ‘the people’ is plastered across almost every Euro-story. In February, Michael Portillo was praised for reminding Chancellor Kohl that the nation state was far from a thing of the past: ‘OUR nation is very important to the people of the United Kingdom. We’ve given away enough to Europe already.’ Kohl is ‘just interested in ...”

“... Poets Press, which would go on to publish around thirty books, including titles by Clive Matson, Michael McClure and John Ashbery as well as Audre Lorde’s collection The First Cities.Despite her centrality to the community of artists and writers on the Lower East Side, di Prima’s work was never afforded the same respect as her fellow male ...”

“... Mullin recognises the tackiness of this fixing operation, and confronts Blair’s adviser Jonathan Powell, who blithely admits that ‘we fucked up . . . but we couldn’t allow a bozo like Livingstone to win.’ Less calculating politicians than the People’s Ken may feel more double-minded about power, turning their energies to policy areas which seem ...”

“... of race. It was as amendments to the Race Relations Act were being discussed in 1968 that Enoch Powell delivered his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. His call for drastic immigration controls, including repatriation, to avoid violence did not lead to his indictment for ‘incitement’ to racial hatred.Many aspects of this complex and lengthy history are ...”