“... subsidy. The company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed ...”

“... as Labour got into power. Both are barbarous and indefensible, except if you’re Clarissa Dickson Wright, who presumably feels her casserole threatened. But what a feast of humbug it is in every department. ‘We do what we like. We always have and always will. That’s democracy.’ 20 September. I am having my lunch outside the front door (salad of ...”

“... well known fact that giving absinthe to a dog would cause it to have an epileptic seizure. Joseph Wright of Derby’s terrifying painting of a bird being asphyxiated in a bell jar by the members of a provincial scientific society depicts an ‘experiment’ repeated more than a century after the importance of air for respiration had been confirmed with a ...”

“... and, duly beaming, produced a complete, pornographically-detailed scenario. According to Lawrence Wright, the author of Remembering Satan: Recovered Memory and the Shattering of a Family,1 Ingram had always been given to extremes. A disciplinarian to his children, fanatically thrifty, absorbed in his Church; over-zealous in his work, he handed out more ...”

“... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...”

“... he attended; gripped by the engagé theatre of Sartre and Camus, and the novels of Richard Wright and Chester Himes. He was also reading Jaspers, Nietzsche, Hegel, Bergson, Bachelard and Lacan – the ‘logician of madness’, he called him, partly in jest. He dreaded the ‘larval, stocky, obsolete life that awaits me once I’ve finished my ...”