“... was uniquely tolerant in Europe, and he noted that when the Dual Monarchy entered the war the cabinet had a Hungarian minister president (István Tisza) and a Polish minister of finance (Leon Biliński). ‘How many Irish ministers are there in Britain?’ he asked. ‘And how many Finnish ministers in Russia?’ He insisted the Austro-Hungarian Empire ...”

“... the essence. Indeed, for all his considerable success in bouncing a reluctant prime minister and Cabinet to accept the new system of select committees in 1979, Norman St John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might ...”

“... Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the 75-year-old defence minister, often described as ‘Mubarak’s shadow’ (and, in US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks, as his ‘poodle’), is not known to look fondly on democracy, or indeed on anything that might weaken the power of the military, which has dominated Egyptian politics since 1952. Tantawi and his men ...”

“... Only months later the Poulson affair burst into public view. When Maudling refused to resign, the cabinet secretary cleverly insisted that the Metropolitan Police be involved in the inquiry. Since Maudling could hardly be the minister responsible for the Met and simultaneously the object of a Met inquiry, he was forced to step down. Amazingly, Thatcher later ...”

“... and analytical volume, which is also more compact, and just as well written, were lost in the shadow of Jenkins’s greater fame. But does any of this justify the enterprise? Well, if Jenkins’s name – and also, it’s fair to add, his reputation as a political biographer – attracts more interest in this kind of subject than would have come to it ...”

“... knew only too well how much work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is ...”

“... eloquence from the polemics, interviews and memoirs included in his two books of non-fiction, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). More recently, we learned something of his comic earthiness, thanks to the witty and profane letters he wrote to his good friend the novelist Albert Murray: their collected correspondence appeared in ...”

“... anticipating her own economic reforms. In Italy, Northern League members of Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet recently proposed Pinochet’s privatisation of Chile’s pension system as the ‘obligatory model’ for their own. In May, General Barry McCaffrey, chief of the US Army Southern Command (with which, contrary to legend, Pinochet’s relations were not ...”

“... famously, the day after the last election: IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT. One (unnamed) Eurosceptic cabinet member said that when the Sun speaks its mind, it ‘shakes the very foundations’ of the Government; most politicians seem easily to accept that the paper’s populist catechism is a genuine and significant representation of opinion. This is made all ...”

“... prewar Paris: poets, lawyers, cyclists, clerics, wrestlers, painters, royalty, cabaret artistes, cabinet ministers, newspaper columnists, a scattering of prominent foreigners. This pop culture social register was ubiquitous (and still is, in the secondary markets of the world), providing a useful map of contemporary celebrity – not exactly fame, since it ...”

“... of consumerism and international cultural exchange – and because the modernisers in Franco’s cabinet had convinced their reluctant and curmudgeonly leader of the need for a more pragmatic authoritarian capitalism: what Franco described in 1968, at the opening of Asturias Airport, as ‘the struggle of markets, the struggle of production’. Even ...”

“... the memory of an ancient curfew is still in their blood; from the time, when at the first fall of shadow, the gates of the ghetto screeched shut with an inviolable monotony that routine had perhaps rendered gentle and familiar to them, a reminder that night was not a time for Jews.Does Jewish time run in a circle or a line? ‘Monotony is the most beautiful ...”

“... roulette. He was posher, by far, than Margaret Thatcher and most of the cowed arrivistes in her Cabinet. And, to cap it all, he’d written several books (both fiction and non-fiction). He had claims to be thought of as an intellectual. Who else, in Thatcher’s Parliament, could say the same? Westminster, in Clark’s diary-portrayal, was peopled almost ...”

“... invasion of Mother’s house, this time a solo effort, is examining the contents of her china cabinet, planning to snaffle a crystal Swarovski owl (wasn’t it he who had bought it for her in the first place – duty free? How could that be stealing?) when he sees Mother’s reflection in a mirror, and realises she has given her bird-carving class a miss ...”

“... 1918, it was Stavisky. For the Fourth Republic, it was the affaire des fuites, when details of Cabinet meetings and security measures were leaked to the Viet-Minh and their Communist allies during the war in Indo-china. For de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, it was the kidnapping and presumed murder of Ben Barka. For his short-lived successor, Pompidou, it was ...”