“... after his conversion in March 1851, an Anglican bishopric became vacant, Manning, told by a cabinet minister that he would certainly have got it, replied: ‘What an escape my poor soul did have.’ Strachey’s comment is that ‘in truth, Manning’s “poor soul” had scented nobler quarry.’ What, he goes on, was the position of an English bishop ...”

“... for example, he seems to have taken a New Labour position almost before such a thing existed. As shadow education minister in the late 1980s he was not, by his own account, an enthusiast for comprehensive education. He has no ‘problem’ with people who send their children to private schools. Many of his ‘close friends’ have done so. He merely thinks ...”

“... also being asked to accept a reduction in status, since the chief whip isn’t a full member of cabinet, though he attends meetings. Gove was deeply resentful. His wife, the Daily Mail journalist Sarah Vine, was livid. ‘I had created a strong team,’ Cameron writes, ‘but tensions and unhappiness were on the rise and the long-term consequences would be ...”

“... state is. Who is in charge: a sovereign Parliament, the citizens through the popular vote, or the cabinet arrogating to itself the royal prerogative? Nobody knows. As a result, we have a House of Commons whose members are largely ex-Remainers committed to a policy they know is wrong for their country. No wonder they are paralysed.Westminster wasn’t designed ...”

“... government instead fell to his younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif, who became prime minister. The new cabinet is filled with Shahbaz’s allies in the PML-N. But the weak showing for his party meant that he also needed the support of the PPP, which was able to finesse many of the most important constitutional positions – including the presidency, now held by ...”

“... disarmament – he was against it, in what is usually put down to a compromise incumbent on him as shadow foreign secretary. He died in 1960, aged 62, leaving the British left with one of its few great legends, the story of a working-class socialist politician pushing against the limits of the Labour Party. Thomas-Symonds’s biography has a perfunctory ...”

“... with oatmeal. The population was swelling, and a demographic crisis had long been looming up. Its shadow helped to set going the ‘emigration mania’ of the 1770s, which carried away twenty thousand Scots, not all of them destitute, some of them small employers. But far more were soon leaving under compulsion of necessity, or landlord greed, and these are ...”

“... rock ’n’ roll epoch. ‘Nice’ working-class boys like Tebbutt’s father grew up in the long shadow of the Great War. Many fathers didn’t return from the Western Front, or did so ruined in body or mind. Bernard Scott, who grew up in Stockport after the war, described it as a ‘town of broken men’, with crippled and deformed ex-soldiers selling ...”

“... reform in London. (They also led to A New London, a book written with Mark Fisher, then Labour’s Shadow Minister for the Arts and Culture, which was essentially the Labour Party’s environment manifesto for the 1992 election.) In 1995, Rogers became the first architect to deliver the Reith Lectures. He spoke about the radical opportunities offered by ...”

“... the Supreme Court – but especially in the case of the Court, Bush v. Gore will cast a very long shadow. According to the living Constitution, the American President is the leading symbol of the nation, the bearer of a democratic mandate, the engine of domestic change and international commitment. This commanding office is largely a creation of the 20th ...”

“... and again, when faced with a political difficulty, Blair takes himself away from his advisers and cabinet colleagues in order to sit and think on his own. But he does not limit himself to contemporary politics. He also likes to dig down into the past, looking for the solutions that escaped some of his predecessors. The most arresting example of this comes ...”

“... forward at just this lever angle from the buttocks; nor a ribcage ending in such a faint inherent shadow line, as if following a vein in the marble. Existing within an idiom. Being entirely at ease with Egypt, which surely meant being in proper awe of it. Stone, the Egyptians thought, or at least the kinds of stone they chose for jobs that mattered ...”

“... but it was Lord Deedes, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and a former Conservative cabinet minister, who brought their lordships down to earth. At the risk of causing hurt looks from my own front bench, I see no likelihood of this Government giving much encouragement to legislation which will antagonise the press. It is better to be blunt. The ...”

“... Sunday, the News of the World splashed the story. Four months later, Blunkett resigned from the cabinet. We now know the answer to Blunkett’s question. The News of the World – first when Rebekah Brooks was editor, then under Coulson – hacked the phones of hundreds of people. In July 2011, after a long cover-up collapsed, Rupert Murdoch closed the ...”

“... only grab a pussy: he can’t be one.) When Obama tried to discuss a no-first-use declaration, his cabinet quickly dissuaded him. Although he achieved the nuclear agreement with Iran, averting a potential war, and expressed symbolic atonement on his visit to Hiroshima, he also oversaw a programme of nuclear modernisation, with a commitment to a trillion ...”