“... has brought more professional skill to the debasement of British public life than you,’ Michael Heseltine recently taunted Mandelson, who beamed back appreciatively. Indeed, so fixed has Mandelson become in the political imagination as Tony Blair’s Rasputin and High Priest of Spin that he is sometimes still dismissed as a bit of a cartoon ...”

“... subject comes up all over the place. Even in élite platoons some sections are better than others. Michael Howard (‘Churchill and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the ...”

“... Florence Nightingale. Yet Strachey himself seems less our contemporary now than he did when Michael Holroyd’s biography appeared in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at ...”

“... is from. He discusses the work of writers from a great variety of backgrounds: Brian Moore, Mary Gordon, Thomas McGonigle and Michael Stephens. Stephens’s work, he says, is best read alongside that of the African-American Trey Ellis, the Latina Sandra Cisneros and the Scot James Kelman, rather than other ...”

“... drastic spring-cleaning of The Waste Land, reveal a rhythm rather than imposing one. Perhaps only Gordon Lish’s transformations of Raymond Carver’s stories impose rhythm in that way. Meadow’s first film, Portrait of Deke, made in 1987, didn’t really come together, didn’t acquire its tone or form until the editing stage. At high school, inspired by ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... made little attempt to exploit the Home Office for electoral mobilisation. The rot began with Michael Howard, who was resolute in his attempt to make Labour appear ‘soft’ on crime, immigration etc. In their determination not to be ‘outflanked’ on the right Blair and Straw went with him all the way. Since Alastair Campbell’s genius did not go as ...”

“... secretaries of the 1980s, who believed little could be done about crime, things got out of hand. Michael Howard’s tough regime and then Straw’s were necessary to get matters back under control. Yet the fuddy-duddies were on the whole right: imprisoning everyone does not work. Howard set out to exploit the assumption that Labour was vulnerable on crime by ...”

“... line’ of 1985 has turned into a global earth-shift. In his contribution to Shafted, Michael Bailey argues that since the spectre of socialism and historical materialism continues to haunt society, it’s legitimate to invoke Walter Benjamin, to keep ‘control of that memory’, and to ‘blast open the continuum of history’. Tony Benn, in his ...”

“... some of the vices that Weber detects in the irresponsible politician? The American philosopher Michael Walzer, writing in 1973, in the immediate aftermath of another misjudged imperial war, detected in Weber’s ‘mature, superbly trained, relentless, objective, responsible and disciplined political leader’ a recognisable type: the type of the ...”

“... I blush to recall – I was already working on an Oscar speech.And then, a week or so later, Gordon Stulberg, the recently appointed CEO of 20th Century Fox, stuck his oar in. He felt the film had no foreign market sales. At a stroke, the new broom swept us away. We were old news. Toast. Losers. The producer and director moved on to their next ...”

“... the battle of Omdurman, the infamous rout of 1898, enacted as revenge for the death of General Gordon, when Kitchener’s troops killed at least ten thousand Sudanese soldiers, with the loss of only 48 Britons. Morris tells us that the Mahdist army was efficiently annihilated (‘It all went like very slow clockwork’), but says nothing about the ...”

“... of union politics; and Ford was succeeded by Jimmy Carter, who commuted the 20-year sentence on Gordon Liddy, one of the Watergate conspirators, after four years and three months because of a perceived disparity between his sentence and that imposed on others. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, pardoned two FBI officers who had authorised illegal ...”

“... The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly unsavoury’ subject. For ...”

“... Stortford, the market town where Rhodes grew up and where his father served as vicar of St Michael’s Church. Storey, whose grip on Victorian society is a little weak, sees Rhodes as insecure about his status. He was in fact proud to belong to the middling thrusters who amassed capital, joined professions and garrisoned the expansion of the British ...”