“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... is never to identify its informant … don’t talk about Lobby meetings BEFORE or AFTER they are held … Do not ‘see’ anything in the Member’s Lobby or any of the private rooms or corridors of the Palace of Westminster … Do not run after a Minister or Private Member … When a member of the Lobby is in conversation with a Minister, MP or ...”

“... dust’. Like le grand Cobb, he loathes Pompidou and all his works – which should not be held to include the Centre Pompidou, since the politician bitterly opposed the Piano-Rogers design, even though it ended up being named after him. (Hazan will therefore only use the building’s alternative title, the Centre Beaubourg – which, in any ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... stance to begin with: shortly before assuming the presidency for the first time in 2000, he told David Frost he sought ‘more profound’ integration with Nato, and ‘would not rule out’ Russian membership. In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks – having himself levelled the remains of Grozny in what was billed as a ‘counterterrorist ...”

“... the point of all this sport-watching? What is it for? I even had a title, drawn from a remark David Sexton, the literary editor of the Evening Standard, once made to me. ‘I’m not interested in sport,’ he said, ‘but I often wish I were, given that the mind is always in pain.’ The mind is always in pain … Yes, given that, you can easily see why ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rules is seen as old-fashioned nonsense.In 2010 an early list of the quangos to be abolished by David Cameron’s new coalition included the administrative branch of the Supreme Court. Now even more direct threats have been made, with government supporters openly questioning the need for such an adjudicative body and various reviews being conducted into ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and (a claim which I do not remember to have seen made before) ‘the reader’s attention is held throughout.’ An indication of the complexities or confusions (as you like) of the poem is that the final scene – the cherry drops into the narrator’s hands, and he eats it – which would most obviously be taken as having the same sexual significance ...”

“... by something of a pause, and the Prime Minister recently announced that a conference would be held of all the races,including – which the proposal does not – the blacks. The scheme provides for three of everything –prime ministers, cabinets, parliaments, regional administrators, mayors, town councils – for the white, Coloured and Indian ...”

“... of female sexual insensibility surprising: they make it incredible. Whether or not Acton genuinely held such a conviction in a restricted form (‘the majority ... are not very much troubled’), an unforced reading of his remarks – without any resort to Freud for a ‘leap’ of interpretation – strongly suggests that his readers did not. (A similar ...”