“... looking at her Twitter sometimes, and I saw grim stuff on it that I can’t check now, because a day or two after Deborah’s death her posts – ‘her support network and her playground,’ in the words of her great friend Suzanne Moore – disappeared. And I can’t check the posts that started appearing last summer, about terrible back pain, useless ...”

“... however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his committed admirers or his committed detractors will be led to change their views. To his admirers, his ten-year tenure as prime minister is ...”

“... The shortest day of the year. We perch on the saddle of a promontory jutting west out of Anglesey into the Celtic Sea and look down into Wen Zawn – the white inlet. It seethes, the waves lift slow and bulky and burst suddenly, propelled by a force-8 gale. Rain hits our anoraks like grapeshot, pelmets of fog lour and droop on South Stack lighthouse, the airstream throws us off-balance and makes breathing difficult if you face into the wind ...”

“... on social media platforms to the vast archive of emails and tweets to which we contribute day after day. This massive quantity of information sits there, ready to be interpreted, if only something coherent can be extracted from the fog. It makes possible a new, panoramic way to assess people, now that evidence of ...”

“... your delight’. When the moment came, the revellers enjoyed Big Ben chiming their ‘independence day’. Some of them got quite tearful, beating their plastic swords against their plastic shields. But the biggest cheer by far came the night after when Tony Hadley arrived to sing Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’. Hadley, the Thatcherite singer in an otherwise ...”

“... recently represented: the City of London, big business, the Union, even Whitehall. To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, how did we end up in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – setting about the seemingly deliberate demolition of the United Kingdom and its economy? From a Tory perspective, things must have reached a ...”

“... Penelope summons Juliet. ‘It’s time,’ she writes. But when Juliet arrives on the appointed day, Penelope has vanished. The news is related with covert, gleeful hostility by the woman who runs the Spiritual Balance Centre – you know the type instantly. But this is the problem. She’s a caricature, just like Don, the Christian minister who appears ...”

“... of close relationships she had that apparently, for whatever reasons, came to nothing: with R.A. Neil, a Cambridge classicist who died of appendicitis when he and Harrison might have been unofficially engaged; with D.S. MacColl, a future director of the Tate, with whom she travelled in Greece, sometimes masquerading as his wife; with the ancient philosopher ...”

“... version of his father, i.e. a more perfect politician. ‘My father believed Beau could one day be president and that he’d get there with my help,’ Hunter writes. Bonded since the death of their mother and baby sister in a car accident in 1972, after which they woke up next to each other in the hospital, Beau and Hunter were Irish twins, a year ...”

“... by Robert Kee’s The World We Left behind. But it’s not the same as a single person’s day-by-day account of – not, of course, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but – what it eigentlich felt like to that person. The dilemma is whether publication should or shouldn’t be in the lifetime of people mentioned in ...”

“... forward-based in Europe.Arpa​ itself was the creation of Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defence Neil McElroy, who had sold soap door to door before rising ever higher at Procter & Gamble: his innovations there ranged from brand management via the competition of rival in-house brands to the now global phenomenon of soap operas. On 20 November 1957, only five ...”

“... editor spent a great deal of time considering what the paper ought to say about the issues of the day, and often disappeared for the entire afternoon to compose some great blockbuster. In my innocence, I regarded this, too, as unprofessional. I was used to editors who took off their jackets and sat down with their sub-editors to lay out the front page and ...”

“... servants such as Mr Bernard Ingham and Mr Charles Powell whom Mrs Thatcher sees many times each day. Isn’t this something we should be concerned about? Three decades after Crichel Down, however, all the House of Commons and the country seem to do is to shrug its collective shoulders. Part of the explanation is the high rate of turnover with news ...”

“... what followed, the US saying only that Wang had an appointment at the consulate and left the next day of his own accord. Since then he has been in the custody of the Chinese government. Reports in the foreign media fuelled online speculation, with the result that all sorts of rumours began to spread – some of them later shown to be true. There were stories ...”

“... Mitchell’s remark that, for a man, ‘there is more to be learned from wearing a dress for a day, than there is from wearing a suit for life.’ Child psychologists argue over whether boys face a struggle in ‘separating’ from their mothers and coming to identify with their fathers, or whether in fact the process is simplified or rendered unnecessary ...”