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“... the regulators – ‘and feel that the next step is to telephone Number 11 or even Number 10 Downing Street, and lobby officials or politicians to put pressure on the supervisors to back down on their judgments.’ King was expressing a belief that bankers can’t be trusted not to try to circumvent normal democratic procedures in an attempt to secure ...”

“... now just for Macmillan. In time, the Aubrey-Maturin books became a cult property. Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were fans, and every now and then a laudatory notice would appear in the TLS or the LRB, for which O’Brian wrote in the 1980s and 1990s.*His life began to change in 1989. Starling Lawrence, an editor at W.W. Norton, read a borrowed paperback of the ...”

“... we note that Mrs Thatcher loves Henry Moore’s work and has not only got some of it for Downing Street and Chequers, but has found that it makes good presents for foreign heads of state. She has also had his tapestries displayed against light oatmeal fabric on the walls of the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in order to devise a setting where the ...”

“... wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to be fought, this was ...”

“... sentenced to death. All this has happened with the support of the West: the US secretary of state, John Kerry, recently handed over half a billion dollars to the Sisi regime. And the situation in Syria has led some to wonder whether, compared to the jihadis, Assad might after all be the best option. The West would be more than tempted to back any suitable ...”

“... The manifesto – co-authored by the then MP for Ipswich, Ben Gummer, and May’s then joint Downing Street chief of staff, the Brummie visionary Nick Timothy – was an unthrottled yell of dissent against Conservatism as we know it. Echoing the Red Toryism recently espoused by Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow, who proposed rebranding the Conservatives as ...”

“... intimate relationship with Wilson, including endless early-morning telephone calls between Downing Street and Vincent Square, is a recurrent theme of the diaries. He is perpetually seeking to become Wilson’s sole adviser, bypassing not only the Cabinet proper but Marcia’s kitchen cabinet too. One can’t help wondering whether things might not have ...”

“... confused policy on the former Yugoslavia and its pseudo-populist sneering about ‘abroad’ (take John Major’s especially silly remark that he would not choose to spend a weekend in any of the countries he has visited over the past few years – even though he spends summer holidays in Portugal). An additional element of seediness came with the revelations ...”

“... too much of a digest: the notes to Chapter Two contain 27 consecutive references to two books by John Barron. Despite the enormous Soviet investment in technical intelligence, Richelson considers its importance smaller than in the United States, because of inferior Soviet technology and the much greater opportunities in the West for both humint operations ...”

“... suffering from chronic anxiety because they can see no way out of their troubles.’ Her colleague John Stiles recently found he had no way to help a 28-year-old woman and her two children who were sleeping rough outside the railway station at Walmer, just down the coast. ‘She has mental health problems,’ Stiles said, ‘and her landlord had evicted her on ...”

“... a rift with her mother (whom Black idolised) which lasted until Mrs Thatcher’s ejection from Downing Street five years later. It was, obviously, unfortunate that the new editor of the country’s most reliably Conservative newspaper should have a frosty relationship with a Conservative Prime Minister. Hastings could always point out, however, that ...”

“... an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing Street after serving continuously since his appointment in 1964, while doubling up all the while as general secretary of the TUC. At any rate, it shows that there was already a mindset that deplored ‘short-termism’ at the 12th-century ...”

“... won’t be his house. Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Arron Banks bought it for him. They own 10 Downing Street, and they own him. Amid a cascade of extreme events and consequences, we all tend to lose focus – not just the humble citizen but those charged with steering us through. Early in the struggle to cope with the aftermath of the explosion at ...”

“... she should take the fight all the way to the Democratic convention in August. And then there was John McCain, in what seemed to be a high school auditorium somewhere in Louisiana (even he wasn’t sure: he thought he was in New Orleans, but he wasn’t), addressing a few hundred sleepy geriatrics, struggling with the teleprompter and grinning weirdly at ...”

“... John Weightman, reviewing Jean-Denis Bredin’s monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century ...”