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“... for Grey, was the unique freedom it offered to ignore parliamentary and press opinion. Grey never held ministerial office in any other department, so developed no experience of public-facing politics. This profoundly limited his own education. Many of his official papers were not even circulated to the full cabinet. Otte suggests that ministers probably ...”

“... it might have posed to the Conservative electoral juggernaut at the 2015 election. Nick Clegg and David Laws would have done better to reflect on the lessons of the 1880s. If free-market pro-EU Liberals had fought the 2015 election as a small but boisterous and essential entity within a Cameron-led coalition, on the model of the Liberal Unionists after ...”

“... her partner of almost fifty years.The relationship, Mullard later told Renault’s biographer David Sweetman, was confusing, exciting, intensely romantic and nerve-racking. Neither had much sexual experience, but Mullard thought Renault knew a little more, and from the first they hid their relationship – from the hospital, and later from the sidelong ...”

“... including, crucially, the election-denying secretary of state candidates. And the Democrats held on to their majority in the Senate and might even increase it if Raphael Warnock prevails over Herschel Walker, a Republican former football star, in the Georgia run-off on 6 December. (That Walker is regarded as a plausible candidate is one of the strange ...”

“... Vega Gupta’s​ wedding was a four-day, three-million dollar extravaganza held at a five-star hotel in Sun City, South Africa, in May 2013. Two hundred guests arrived from New Delhi on a chartered Airbus that was allowed to land at a nearby military airbase. Vega’s uncle Atul Gupta met the guests, who were taken to the resort without any passport or visa checks ...”

“... Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something. But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy.No, I was not the right reader, then, for I am more certain of the parameters of mysticism than philosophy, at least as it is practised by those who ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... I was there, at seven o’clock one March morning, a small area of a vast concrete-floored shed held rows of yellow boxes filled with fish packed on crushed ice: cod longer than my arm, skate like kites made of mangled flesh, the astonished eyes of haddock. Porters, buyers and auctioneers milled around in white coats and hats and yellow wellies, bidding for ...”

“... of competition is that there are winners and losers. The electricity competition has now been held. It is over, and Britain lost. From the point of view of technology and capital, electric Britain is no longer a centre. It is another centre’s province. The most unexpected consequence of selling the country’s electric legacy, the consequence that most ...”

“... on its relative merits, as one idiom among others. This in turn cast doubt on the long story that held us together, with its passage through the Enlightenment to liberal democracy, Europe’s unique discovery, which it meant to hand down across the generations. Identity too was an issue, if people could move fluently between one and another ...”

“... his way immediately to Iseult’s house. She was later arrested for harbouring him briefly and held for a month before being found not guilty. By the time Fisk’s book came out I was no longer seeing much of Francis and Madeleine. In 1982, we had printed a letter about Stuart’s column which accused him of having been a Nazi supporter. On the morning In ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... by something squalid that squats ‘lookin’ up at ’im, you see’. But he dies a vertical man, held upright by some obscure passionate intensity, almost a principle. The only function of the other figure is to look up to this dreadful but memorable intensity. To identify him (let alone her, let alone to make the body that of Mrs Bathurst) will only ...”

“... administrative system during the Second World War. In the spring of 1945, a conference was held in San Francisco to set up the United Nations. It hadn’t originally been scheduled to discuss a separate body for health, but a Chinese medic and diplomat’s son called Szeming Sze managed to push it onto the agenda, where it was overwhelmingly ...”

“... in the 1960s a fighter in the underground against the military dictatorship, who had never held or run for electoral office before. With Lula at her side, she coasted to victory with a 56 per cent majority, the first woman to win the presidency. Initially better received by a middle class that detested Lula, for two years she enjoyed quite widespread ...”