“... and American aspiration. The twist comes in the form of a man disguised as a meter reader who means to abscond with Alison and make her his wife, unless ‘fuckwise it went bad’, in which case he intends to kill her, ditch her corpse, ‘then lay low, watch the papers like he’d done with the non-arousing redhead’. Kyle, who lives in a strict ...”

“... to her career tell us much more about ourselves than they do about her. We did not hear from David Cameron that she eventually became an embarrassment to the Conservative Party. Before the great banking bust of 2008, which owed much to her policies, he had ditched her and her legacy. No one pointed out either that, despite her well-known convictions and ...”

“... and folk tales are clumsy and blundering and foolish, and their strength doesn’t always prevail: David fells Goliath with a slingshot (like a child in a bombsite playground), and poor boy Jack can outwit the ogre at the top of the beanstalk, however big and strong and vicious and rich he is, and make off with the golden goose. Such stories are popular ...”

“... solution, preferring the narrow Israeli interpretation of the Oslo Accords and, later, the Camp David summit and the Geneva programme. This means consenting to a Palestinian state in control of the Gaza Strip and those parts of the West Bank where Jews are not densely settled (thereby allowing Israel to annex Greater ...”

“... of which three-quarters are people, from Aalto to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised ...”

“... Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Nelson Francis, Morton Bloomfield, E.L. Epstein, John Lyons, Archibald Hill, James Sledd, R.I. McDavid Jr, R.K. O’Cain, Linda Barnes, Josef Vachck and Barbara Strang. So varied as well as distinguished a ...”

“... its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of other works of art appear together with a candle, a skull, an hourglass ...”

“... forms. Struggling with these weighty powers, the poems slow down. Robertson’s work by no means avoids the bustling life of cities, but it is marked by a negative reaction to that life. The poems seem to be reacting to a wound of some kind (there are frequent accounts of mutilation and bodily disintegration) for which rural ways are a partial ...”

“... a perspective which recalled the days in which feats of organisation were revered by Labour as a means of securing votes. Here was a political arcadia in which dozens of local parties could boast more than two thousand members, at least a tenth of whom could be relied upon to help rally the faithful when elections came. He blamed the declining faith in ...”

“... both sides make impassioned appeals to the authority of the recent past: a past within which means tests and prescription charges, Bevanism and Butskellism, visionary utopianism and new realism, all churn together in the popular imagination. Charles Webster’s The Health Services since the War, which translates the folklore of the NHS into carefully ...”

“... only just, on the side of those who rejected the proposition that sexual intercourse was simply a means of producing children. His relations with the opposite sex were ostensibly platonic and more than a little confused. On the other hand, he became solemnly interested in issues such as the ‘native question’, with a painstakingly balanced observation of ...”

“... that the lawyers regard Dicey as a Great Brain.) The problem with the Rule of Law is that it means very little if the executive can make up the law as it goes along. Ewing and Gearty show this happening continually in the interwar period. People were harassed, premises raided, harmless citizens arrested and imprisoned, meetings banned, crowds beaten ...”

“... in Cambridge for nearly forty years, but the nature of his publishing and readership history means that this collected poems is as much a launch as a consolidation. His first collection, and the only one to appear from a mainstream publisher until now, was Force of Circumstance (1962), a book that reads like a culmination (which in a sense it is, since ...”

“... burden of the Poor Law from local property taxes to the central state. Financing pensions by means of income tax ran the risk of being politically divisive, since it would be redistributive. The alternative was social insurance (Bismarck had introduced such a scheme in Germany in 1889), with a flat-rate contribution from employers and employees, and ...”

“... been thought by many, including the government, to form part of customary international law. That means it is binding on all states whatever their treaty commitments. It is not unlawful under domestic law for Parliament to place the UK in breach of international law. But the fact that no domestic court can stop Parliament breaching international law ...”