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“... that is) has turned into tenners. What a triumph for supply-side economics! The trouble, as Michael Jenkin tells us, is that there have not been enough Steve Buxtons hovering over the rigs in the North Sea. And in the absence of a sufficient number of home-grown entrepreneurs, ministers and civil servants have felt obliged to see if they could force a ...”

“... to wonder whether it is the original author (in the following case, Harriet Monroe) or the editor (Michael Grant) or you yourself who must be getting giddy: ‘While stating nothing, it suggests everything that is in his rapidly moving mind, in a series of shifting scenes which fade in and out of each other like the cinema. The form, with its play of ...”

“... know, or think they know, most of the answers. In this sense, Barnes both celebrates and mocks the powers of reason. He shows us Intelligence in overdrive, but he also requires us to wonder if it’s chosen the right road. Asking questions is supposed to be a ‘good thing’, to do with being neither fooled nor squashed. But is it not also an affliction, a ...”

“... to arrest and prosecution. Bartlett describes the case of a pseudonymous British man called Michael, whom he interviewed for the book. In his fifties, happily married with a grown-up daughter, Michael protests, quite genuinely it seems, that he is ‘a very ordinary, heterosexual bloke. I was never ...”

“... he touched, the privatisation of the probation service being his worst policy. His successor, Michael Gove, at least recognised the depth of the problems he inherited. In 2015 he said that British justice was the gold standard for those who could pay, but everyone else ‘has to put up with a creaking, outdated system’. He gave emphatic support to ...”

“... epigraph to the dynamic driving Shelley’s literary career’, according to the poet and critic Michael O’Neill, one of our best Shelleyan commentators. The ghostly effects that this penchant for intangibility enables in his poetry – its distinctive repertoire of veils and shadows and hauntings – are eerily magnificent and inimitably his own. No other ...”

“... and group identity, exacerbated by the existence of oil and strategic assets which keep the super-powers waiting anxiously on the side-lines, hesitating to intervene directly, yet too opportunistic, or unsure of their interests, to blow the final whistle. The emergence of Israel as a monopolist nuclear power in the region, as documented by Professor ...”

“... about the Bomb is not an easy task. For anarchists or pacifists the exercise of violence by state powers throughout history has been intrinsically regrettable. But any style of political assessment which weights consequences more heavily than these do must recognise practical connections (sometimes of a surprising kind) between the history of civilised social ...”

“... call of duty. To go back further, before the First World War even most Liberals wanted to curb the powers of the House of Lords, if not to abolish it altogether. And now where are we? The House of Lords has more influence than it used to have. Labour Life Peers are devoted to the House and prouder of their titles than any earl or marquis of ancient ...”

“... this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and authority seems straightforward enough, for Oakeshott was widely held to be the most ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Salisbury witnesses the transitional phase of English imperialism and the arrival of other powers: Germany, even ghastly America. Short-sighted and apocalyptic, he donates to the party he loves a pessimism matched only, in contemporary writing, by psychiatric authors who had lost all faith in the educative power of the Victorian asylum – such as ...”

“... into a large, variegated higher education system is merely to charge them with lacking divine powers. They were right to put central insistence on a massive expansion. The ‘more-will-mean-worse’ school was inept and unrealistic. Entrance standards had risen sharply since the 1930s. Those gaining A-level qualifications were increasing every ...”

“... multiple articulations that we all manage quite easily as babbling infants, and reduce our phonic powers to the narrow range of one particular language. In doing so, we lose our capacity potentially to say everything in the attempt to say some things. The ‘echolalia’ of the book’s title is the echo of this lost speech, the remnant of this ‘indistinct ...”

“... itself solve a region’s problems. In a sub-Saharan echo of debates over the Middle East, Western powers – and the US and Britain in particular – are accused by many observers of advocating regime change without giving much thought to what follows. Lurd, for its part, has shown little evidence of a clear command structure or an aim beyond unseating the ...”