“... same frame as Albert and Harold of Steptoe and Son, Oscar and Felix of The Odd Couple, or Arthur Wilson and George Mainwaring of Dad’s Army is to see that the comedy is the result of a relationship rather than the brittle patter of variety cross-talk. Influence in comedy, as in literature, takes some unexpected twists and, like the tradition described by ...”

“... more than ‘a crumb on the banquet table of MGM’, Nancy Davis wangled a date with Ronald Wilson Reagan. For more than two years, however, the rest was not history, but still more anxious striving on her part. Reagan had just been dropped by his wife, Jane Wyman, and was doing the rounds of B-movie starlets. It was only when Nancy got pregnant that he ...”

“... than that Morrison would have done no better. So the wearisome catalogue continues with Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan: all men of considerable, and different, talents but hardly characterised by resounding political success; that Gaitskell was never prime minister seems hardly to weigh more or less than Wilson’s achievement ...”

“... brutal, irreverent message had got through, they laughed and laughed. Unlike his two successors, David Steel and Paddy Ashdown, Thorpe was, in fact, a pretty considerable Commons performer. His natural habitat, though, was the platform and, after he became Party leader in 1967, his annual address at what was still then called the Liberal Assembly took its ...”

“... into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’s ...”

“... than a help’. In the US, despite the State Department’s support of intervention, Woodrow Wilson was dubious: the best policy, he suspected, was ‘to clear out of Russia and leave the Russians to fight it out among themselves’. In Britain, David Lloyd George had similar reservations, but his government included a ...”

“... up with attempts to win them over. Early on in his tenure, Radji lunches with a helpful figure, David Spanier, the Diplomatic Correspondent of the Times. Spanier tells him that there are only ‘about fifteen to twenty people who are the opinion-makers in the British press and suggests I establish regular dialogues with them. And he warns against attempts ...”

“... reluctantly set up in 1954 by Lord Kilmuir in his previous incarnation as the Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe. He had assumed that the Report would silence those calling for reform and to that end appointed the ultra-respectable public school headmaster Sir John Wolfenden to chair it. When Wolfenden recommended that homosexual acts between consenting ...”

“... example, letting any cats out of the bag on the topic of the Belgrano. Moreover, just as Harold Wilson wanted an eye kept on Jim Callaghan when he was Foreign Secretary and therefore placed the reliable David Ennals as Number Two in the Foreign Office, so Mrs Thatcher wanted to keep her potential successor, Michael ...”

“... thing’. He gathers his close advisers, who in this case include his chief scientific adviser, David King. King explains to him what needs to be done. ‘Essentially, by means of graphs and charts he set out how the disease would spread, how we could contain it if we took the right culling measures, and how over time we would eradicate it.’ Blair was ...”

“... on other lyricists are smart, but disconcerting. They’re like Nabokov tearing strips off Edmund Wilson over Eugene Onegin, or Norman Mailer beating up on his rivals for Heavyweight Champion of the Novel. And they tread all over the melancholy Sondheim shares with Hart. Sondheim once wrote a play of his own, Getting Away with Murder (that old theme), but it ...”

“... sculpture for the Italian Renaissance, there was an unruliness in Turner and Constable, as against Wilson, say, which made them radically transform rather than imitate their model. They took Claude’s compositions as theatres within which to work out their personal obsessions. Turner bombarded scenes out of Claude with brilliant light, at once decomposing and ...”

“... tinkering which leaves corporate bias unaffected, of the sort that was fashionable in the era of Wilson and Heath; that the current government’s notion that our ills can be cured merely by narrowing the scope of state intervention, and pretending that corporate bias does not exist, is equally barren; and that the alternative notion that the cure lies in ...”

“... book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party is less dramatic: we see Brown, Mandelson and Blair in a morning-after sprawl; Brown’s big toe ...”

“... it looks as if the electorate has abandoned them too – hence his dumping of the Tories in 1997. David McKnight sees all this differently. Murdoch knew that he could have no influence in China. There was no point in alienating its government and damaging his profits, so he ditched the promotion of democracy and with it the BBC and Patten. In 1997, Murdoch ...”