“... the morning after was arguably nothing more than a cosmetic change on the face of Israel. On the day of the election I woke up in my apartment in Tel Aviv, but I had to get to Jerusalem to vote, since I have never told the authorities (or myself) that I am a Tel Avivian (I am not: I just happen to live there). The radio was celebrating democracy’s great ...”

“... Hansard, to find out who was spoken of among her colleagues as the Coming Man. She reported back a day or so later. ‘Tony Blair.’ ‘Never heard of him.’ ‘He’s a used Johnnie,’ she added – this being the name by which former members of St John’s College, Oxford, refer to themselves. We knew that because both of us were also, to use the posh ...”

“... Barbara Hosking​ was eating chicken curry in a bungalow in Tanganyika one day in the 1950s when she felt the room shaking. She was lunching with her old schoolfriend Mary, and this was the bungalow they shared. Both women were then working as office managers for a British-owned gold, copper and silver mine in Mpanda ...”

“... by a blandly generic term. Perhaps the best strategy would be to vary one’s surname from day to day to avoid the indignity of being labelled. Stereotypes, however, are not always pejorative, whatever these authors may think. They write in their preface of the ways that ‘deeply ingrained stereotypes shed negative ...”

“... a notice on a wreath of chrysanthemums announces that Reg Stone passed peacefully away on Boxing Day and that his cortège will be passing through the market at three o’clock. Until I read the card I’d never known his last name. Reg’s stall was a feature of the market long before I moved here in 1961. Then he had two prices, sixpence and a shilling. In ...”

“... self-regard. He was a monster of excess, capable when he was behind on a deadline of writing day in day out for 18 hours out of the 24, and of sleeping for just as long in his intervals of exhaustion. If his complaining correspondence were to be believed, you might assume that writing and sleeping were all he had time ...”

“... you,’ he said, ‘when it fires it’s as if a horse has kicked you back from the grave.’ Robin Robertson, the poet and editor, was born with a heart in which one of the valves – the aortic valve – was composed of only two cusps instead of the usual three. The aortic valve prevents backflow from the aorta into the principal ventricle of the ...”

“... Fielding, no softie on crime, was surprised that there were not far more criminals. The other day, in a reference to the recent riots in Newcastle, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after mentioning that in the late 18th century some children were employed in mines or mills for six days a week, quoted the Bishop of Chester as saying in 1785 that on Sundays ...”

“... Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but Jack Jones and Stan Newens MP; not only Robin Blackburn of New Left Review but Mike le Cornu, shop steward at Heathrow. They all, with remarkably few reservations, agree with Hobsbawm not only that there is a crisis of capitalism but that the apparent ineffectiveness of the Left is, therefore, all the ...”

“... for the feminist movement the label of bra-burners. Nothing had actually been set on fire that day – the town, which was worried about its wooden boardwalks, had refused to give a permit – and the label was highly selective: in addition to the offending undergarment, the women dumped copies of Playboy and Cosmopolitan, eyelash curlers, false ...”

“... is slowly destroying the Labour Party, and it will not be rescued by a reasonable competence at day-to-day management – any more than the Conservative Party could be rescued by Major’s government in its last couple of years. In judging this government, therefore, we should look beyond such economic competence, however ...”

“... seat, said or did nothing at all on his own account – no leading questions in the style of Sir Robin, no Paxmanite raised eyebrows. His job, performed perfectly, was to instruct (no, not invite) speakers to answer each other; and monitor to the second the share of time they were taking. ‘Answer that in 28 seconds, Bengt Westerberg,’ he coolly told the ...”

“... with devastating consequences for Kuwait, and later for the Kurds and Shi’a of southern Iraq. Robin Cook’s backtracking on the fate of the British nurses, after his indignant outburst to the effect that a sentence of 500 lashes has no place in a modern society, was not only inspired by the thought that shouting at Saudis is an unreliable way to persuade ...”

“... visitors who saw them in public galleries is less clear. Like van Meegeren, he became a kind of Robin Hood folk hero, the little man – and nearly all forgers, at least those who’ve been caught, are men – against the establishment.But the forger’s forger, strongly represented in the show, struck a different pose. Eric Hebborn was an alumnus of the ...”

“... her van) was able to live. October 1969 When she is not in the van Miss S. spends much of her day sitting on the pavement in Parkway, where she has a pitch outside Williams and Glyn’s Bank. She sells tracts, entitled ‘True View: Mattering Things’, which she writes herself though this isn’t something she will admit. ‘I sell them but so far as the ...”