“... 2014; names being touted include Donald Tusk, Guy Verhofstadt, José Luis Zapatero, Pascal Lamy, Martin Schulz and Barroso himself. If turnout continues to fall as it has since 1979, the winner could end up with the support of less than 10 per cent of European voters. In sum, the European Parliament appears unreformable. A substantial section of Europe’s ...”

“... vigorously in California for Barry Goldwater’s doomed presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson. Several times a day, Reagan gave the same speech he had been making for years. The substance was reactionary boilerplate: casting off the shackles of government regulation, rolling back the Soviet Union, freeing the enslaved populations of Eastern ...”

“... between car and human engineering. Jill Charnley remembers him roaring down to London in his Aston Martin – ‘a brute of a car, a good engineering car’ – to visit her. He told her he was redesigning nature, and illustrated his theories with ball bearings from the British Motor Corporation’s new Mini. They were married in 1957 and Jill moved into his ...”

“... on in Bolivia in 1967 was wide of the mark. Anyone reading the reports that arrived on Lyndon Johnson’s desk in 1967 would have been told of the extraordinary impact that Guevara’s guerrillas were making – at a time when they were facing disaster.None of the biographers found their research stint in Cuba easy. The record of Cuba’s internationalist ...”

“... lawyerly approach to political philosophy, ticking off useful concepts and ignoring the rest. Paul Johnson (perhaps not the most reliable witness) described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship ...”

“... its product offering.’ I heard that the military was developing robot soldiers. I heard Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon say: ‘They don’t get hungry. They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot.’ I heard him say: ‘I have been asked what happens if the ...”

“... It’s an old tactic and it is still in play around the Grenfell disaster. As soon as Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the public inquiry, announced that he would be seeking answers rather than taking dictation from those with passionate feelings, he was dismissed as a ‘posh white man’. It was reported that the community felt he had ‘the ...”

“... to his body as a walking lab, pills slushing against potions in his insides. Ten years earlier, Martin Amis had reviewed one of the first British documentaries about Aids for the Observer. Aids, he wrote, ‘is a visitation that makes you believe in the Devil’: With Aids … it seems to be promiscuity itself that is the cause. After a few hundred ...”