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“... crucial figure in this transformation. But he is not alone. His key colleague is, also obviously, Gordon Brown, with whom there are – Old Labour stalwarts dreaming of a New Jerusalem after the Blair to Brown handover, please note – plenty of personal differences but almost no ideological ones. And then there are the figures who travelled further in ...”

“... writers – Bernard Levin, Philippa Pullar – put their hand to food, or food pundits – Michael Smith, Egon Ronay – venture upon writing. The caricaturists of Puritanism did their work early, for the Restoration Court exercised a Reagan-like hold on the media. At this period, one of the 17th century’s better cookery books – apparently the work ...”

“... advantage gained from controlling Persian Gulf hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs. In 1945, Gordon Merriam, the head of the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs division, made this clear: the Saudi oilfields, he said, were first and foremost ‘a stupendous source of strategic power’. The assistant secretary of state, Adolf Berle, sketched out ...”

“... Policy Studies. These two books, by contrast, deal almost exclusively with Strachey’s politics. Michael Newman writes only briefly about Strachey’s private life, though he does reveal that young Charles Strachey, born at the height of his father’s revolutionary fervour, was promptly put down for Eton. Noel Thompson calls his book ‘an intellectual ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... Netherlands. But when the votes were counted, it became clear that things weren’t going to plan. Gordon Brown might take some consolation from Cowen’s troubles: he had been barely a month in the job. Whatever hopes Ahern may have cherished that his self-sacrifice would be rewarded with a plum EU position disappeared. The Lisbon vote revealed a striking ...”

“... tennis life from the Fifties to the Seventies such as those provided in the South African player Gordon Forbes’s memoir A Handful of Summers, with its details of that less commercial and high-pressured time when top tennis players didn’t stay at the Ritz but at a club member’s house and when even Rod Laver shared a room. How can one give an adequate ...”

“... survived in office after ditching his mistress via text message – it’s hard to imagine Gordon Brown getting away with that. But now and again, one hears a keening strain from the old country. On the Alexanderinkatu recently a dress shop was enticing passers-by with ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, the D:Ream chantalong which Labour ran as its ...”

“... only one or two bees per bonnet. The Pevsnerian approach was different.In a witty essay, Michael Taylor, who drove Pevsner round Warwickshire, recalls the experience as stimulating and slightly nightmarish, ‘like viewing a video of a thousand years … of history … fast-forwarded’. Pevsner ‘robbed the word “specialist” of its meaning by ...”

“... coalition’, ‘citizens of nowhere’) has been flung about like confetti. Some characters (Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt) have kept reappearing in different costumes; others (Gavin Williamson) played cameos which, in retrospect, seem scarcely real.One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according ...”

“... upset. Aside from Berlin, the only thinkers to survive Gray’s bombardment without a scratch are Michael Oakeshott and Karl Popper. Gray even pays Oakeshott the compliment of quoting him twice: ‘In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor ...”

“... appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become ...”

“... this century’s crop already included Russ McDonald’s Shakespeare’s Late Style (2006), Gordon McMullan’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (2007) and a Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays edited by Catherine Alexander (2009). If there is something intriguingly late aesthetically about these plays, there is also something ...”

“... law. This isn’t really a law at all, but rather the extrapolation of an observation made by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the computer chip company Intel. By 1965, Moore had noticed that silicon chips had for a number of years been getting more powerful, in relation to their price, at a remarkably consistent rate. He published a paper predicting ...”

“... questions has become: what is analytical philosophy? An influential answer has been provided by Michael Dummett, until recently the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford and the author of several important books on Frege and the philosophy of language. Significantly, Dummett’s most recent books have been concerned with history, particularly his Origins of ...”