“... this also was not organised. There was soon a glut. An austere young business man from Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller, set out to capture the refining and extend the marketing in a strategy of what later came to be called ‘integration’. By the 1880s, his corporation. Standard Oil, controlled more than four-fifths of the American market. At the same ...”

“... two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a ...”

“... suddenly that Germany was not the peaceful country he had long supposed, but one run by Junkers? John Grigg, whose work receives all too little recognition in this book, has pointed out that Lloyd George’s sympathy with France was nothing new. He had shown it 13 years earlier over Fashoda. The new revelation concerned Germany. In Professor Gilbert’s ...”

“... the voice of the working class inside Whitehall, and feels looked down on by the Oxbridge elite in Downing Street and the Treasury. This person compared the ethos of the Home Office to that of Millwall fans: ‘No one likes us, we don’t care.’ Home secretaries see the world in Hobbesian terms, as a dangerous and frightening place, in which vulnerable ...”

“... and defiance was blown away in a single puff. Clark was summoned to the Great Presence in Downing Street, where his heroine told him he was being soppy and sentimental about animals and uncharacteristically silly about the huge commercial profits from trapping animals by the leg. After a spirited resistance of about forty minutes, Clark ...”

“... by Desmond Rice and Arthur Gavshon, and Messrs Secker and Warburg to interview Rear Admiral Sir John Woodward and Commander Christopher Wreford-Brown DSO, Royal Navy, about the sinking of the General Belgrano; and if he will make a statement. Mr Stanley: As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said to the hon. Gentleman on 21 February 1984, the ...”

“... to the assessments that claimants had to undergo in order to receive disability benefits. As John Pring shows in The Department, these changes – and others that followed – would ‘lead to countless deaths of disabled people’.Many governments have talked up the number and significance of false claims. A decade before the Blenheim conference, Peter ...”

“... back out into space. The existence of the effect was first posited in 1859 by the Irish scientist John Tyndall, who said that without the greenhouse effect ‘the warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost’. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius added to ...”

“... start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to ...”

“... SNP and the SLP were destroyed, and the stridently anti-devolution Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street. This depressing course of events did, however, make possible a complete rethinking of nationalist arguments. The SNP went through several decades of uncomfortable revision and policy reformulation. Maxwell recognised that European integration ...”

“... of the intergovernmental talks was the frank relationship between the British prime minister, John Major, and his Irish counterpart, Albert Reynolds. ‘It went all right – I chewed his bollocks off and he took a few lumps outa me,’ Reynolds announced casually after he and Major had emerged from an hour-long one-on-one meeting. On 15 December 1993 the ...”

“... compensates for any parsimony in the archival evidence available to him. For example, in 1945 Sir John Colville recorded in his diary, since published and now firmly in the public domain: ‘I don’t like the would-be ingratiating way in which Macmillan bares his teeth.’ Davenport-Hines digresses at some length, starting from the observation that ...”

“... mutual regard between the two leaders. Eden’s turn against Nasser came with the dismissal of Sir John Glubb as Chief of Staff of the Arab Legion in March 1956. Glubb Pasha, writes Kyle, ‘was a British newspaper reader’s legend’. With his fall the reality of Britain’s diminished role in the Middle East suddenly struck home. Eden, it should be ...”

“... success. Thatcher’s government was able to satisfy enough of the electorate enough of the time: John Major paid the penalty. The present government has gone on about benefit fraud and claimed that cuts will stiffen the backbone of the poor, but it has primarily justified its policies on economic grounds, claiming that the private sector will pick up the ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”