Search Results

“... Are judges flirting with ‘judicial supremacism’ by questioning the sovereignty of Parliament? Or are ministers flouting the rule of law, by interfering with judicial independence? Is the Government minded to hobble the judges’ powers to review the way in which ministers and other public officers exercise their powers? Should British courts be given greater powers to remedy breaches of basic human rights and freedoms, or would that mean turning judges into unelected politicians? Are judges competent to decide questions of public policy? Do we need a code of modern constitutional principles to guide the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government? Or are we better advised, as Conor Gearty advised us (LRB, 16 November 1995), not to give more power to ‘unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable judges’ by weaving the European Human Rights Convention into the fabric of British law, but instead to reform Parliament and the electoral system, and devolve power away from the already over-powerful central government? Questions of this kind were rarely raised a generation ago; now they are commonplace ...”

“... as the splendour, of the emperor’s new clothes. For the handful of liberals – Lord Scarman, Anthony Lester, Michael Zander – who have been arguing for decades that we need to have our rights and the government’s powers written down and invigilated by independent judges, the Nineties are looking like the moment of truth. That they were right ...”

“... surrogate for gender. Subsequent court decisions have had to follow suit. While the pioneering QC Anthony Lester, provided for Mr James by the Equal Opportunities Commission, has always insisted that the finding of direct discrimination was the right one in principle, critics point out that it was only if the undoubted discrimination was recognised as ...”

“... Bill of Rights has not had a big place on the agenda of the Left. To be fair, Lord Scarman and Anthony Lester (also founder signatories of Charter 88) have long argued that such a Bill was a necessary step in the protection of civil liberties. But the recent history of the campaign for a Bill of Rights lies more, if anything, with Lord Hailsham and ...”

“... and political character, has generated the 2090 pages of Clayton and Tomlinson, the 889 pages of Lester, Pannick and Herberg and the 813 pages of Beatson, Grosz, Hickman, Singh and Palmer. These books are all squarely aimed at barristers seeking to express the interests of their clients in terms of human rights in order to achieve a victory that might ...”

“... for property rights and for the need to ensure the enforceability of contracts. No one could read Anthony Lester and Geoffrey Bindman’s pathbreaking work on Race and Law (1972) – the early chapters of which cover the hostility of the common law to race discrimination law – and come to any other conclusion. Not only do we lawyers often simply not ...”

“... he was a ghost in his own country, but an iconic figure in Cuba. In The Man Who Invented Fidel, Anthony DePalma notes that Castro, in the 1960s, had offered to grant him Cuban citizenship: ‘What a splendid Cuban Herbert Matthews would make,’ a Cuban publication proclaimed, ‘so upright and so just!’ On his last trip to Cuba, in 1972, Matthews, gaunt ...”

“... work of many novelists who started publishing fiction in the 1950s – Butor and Murdoch but also Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Pynchon – and who were not just trying to make sense of our lives but, as Kermode put it, ‘making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’.For Murray, ‘a real Pynchon thing’ is the mode of ...”

“... social scale: ‘It was no fun, it was just nasty, dirty and degrading’ was the verdict of Renee Lester, a Scunthorpe mother of six; while, in a survey of attitudes to religion, a divorced working-class woman from Oldham described heaven as ‘similar to life here but no sex’. Kynaston’s carefully researched account of social attitudes in the 1940s and ...”

“... were, And lived lesse in awe; Now, God be thanked! People feare More to ofend the law. Anthony Munday, in his play The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington (1598), redated the hero to the end of the 12th century, which had ‘the remarkable effect of reversing his political tendency’. Munday makes Robin’s enemies ‘only the corrupt and the ...”

“... ends up producing a fable very much in their own image.In​ June 1961, the Mancunian polymath Anthony Burgess and his first wife, Lynne, took a holiday in the USSR. In Cold War Leningrad there were echoes for Burgess of his backstreet Manchester childhood. The music of accents: voices that were exotic yet strangely familiar, a chorus of hard-tongued ...”

“... Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July ...”