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“... the future of Europe that would challenge the West as well as the East. But Kohl noted that every day two thousand were crossing and not going back, that the East German economy, considered the best available model of the command system, was almost on its knees, that the Monday mobs in Leipzig, not the dreamers of East Berlin, were setting the pace, and that ...”

“... history’, and Foot’s clear culpability in allowing such a crazy document to see the light of day. He is also by a long way too kind about Jill Foot’s appalling misjudgment in encouraging her husband to fight on, thus guaranteeing his personal and political humiliation, and then suggesting, in mid-campaign that he was soon to retire anyway. Finally Foot ...”

“... as a ‘deadly experiment’. Worst of all – at least as judged by the economic rationale of the day – the introduction of free labour and agricultural production had done nothing to ‘improve’ Britain’s wards in Sierra Leone.Much of this criticism was coloured by the Scottish Enlightenment theory of stadial progress, which held that all peoples ...”

“... for Clarence Thomas, narrowly confirmed in 1991 – presaged the hyper-polarisation of the present-day confirmation process.Bork and Thomas, like Scalia, espoused originalism, a reactionary trend in American jurisprudence whose followers try to recover either the original intent of the framers of the late 18th-century constitution or the meaning the document ...”

“... concerned with social justice.’ Proof of this concern came almost at once. On 12 May 1994, the day John Smith died, Andersen Consulting announced that its new director of research was to be Patricia Hewitt, Neil Kinnock’s former press officer and deputy chair of the Party’s Social Justice Commission. The ice-cool ...”

“... by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It reads: Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, 26 September, as he came to ...”

“... worked with an even rarer zeal as a minister for what he saw as the national good. But late in the day – long after the period covered by these diaries – he seems to have realised that the Head was not quite the Arnold he presented himself as, that the prefects were smoking behind the cricket pavilion, that the teachers were trying to seduce the boys, and ...”

“... urged their young supporters to hide their conservative grandparents’ identity cards on election day in order to prevent them from voting. ‘That happens in Spain too,’ another student said (Spain is number 32 on the index). Earlier that summer in Norway (No. 11), Aslaug Haga, the minister for oil and energy, and leader of the Centre Party, resigned ...”

“... for the council in 1970 at the age of 22. Ten years later the young politician had put aside his day job as a teacher and was now leader of Sheffield council, a truly astonishing rise for a man with his disadvantages. Blunkett in power in Sheffield was Blunkett Mark One. He concentrated on his particular concerns of public transport and geriatric care. (A ...”

“... many people including myself, 11 September has long been a date of mourning and rage. On that day in 1973, lethal aircraft flew low over a major city and destroyed a great symbolic building: the Presidential palace in Santiago, known (because it had once been a mint) as La Moneda. Its constitutional occupant, Salvador Allende, could perhaps have bargained ...”

“... John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of me Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington. 15 March 1994. A reply arrives from John Major ...”

“... She filed a bastardy suit against Scott, and won $5 a month in child support. She got $25 on her day in court, and that was all. She and her brother Luther were now in the habit of driving to Chicago, where Kathleen would flirt with men in bars and lure them out into the street so that Luther could beat them up and take their money. They tried it closer to ...”

“... notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s revolution, the ...”

“... Times’s Labour Editor, now the Times’s Labour Editor – is among the best reporters of the day, in his own or any other field. In the course of the miners’ strike he was paid the singular compliment (by the NUM secretary, Peter Heathfield) of being seriously thought to have bugged a crucial National Executive meeting, so accurate was his reporting of ...”

“... that leaving the ERM would be a disaster and had even raised interest rates 5 per cent in a day in order to stay in. Then, when we fell out, low inflation, faster growth and lower unemployment ensued. This was why the Government was given no credit for the economy: it had got it right only by mistake and against its will. The lesson learned by many ...”