“... Leman Street to Cannon Street Road, all-night clubs with noisy jukeboxes, packed with Irish or Welsh prostitutes, many of whom died young as a result of illegal abortions or drug-related illnesses. These pimps and bullies, some of them Bengali like their customers, anticipated the criminal behaviour that community spokesmen claim is only a recent ...”

“... a map on the warm bonnet of the car, catching at its flapping corners in awkward gusts of Welsh wind. We are on a camping holiday, we are lost, and he is trying to tame the map so we don’t get loster. The high, solid hedgerows obscure the view and are not marked on the map. Nor are the wild raspberries that grow in the hedgerows. Nor is the ...”

“... immigration lawyer and an accountant working in one of London’s temples of public art. ‘Irish, Welsh, Iraqi, Bengali … three Bengalis. And myself, English,’ Quinn said. It’s the sort of diversity that might have pleased Bevan. But the government wants Quinn out.In the 1990s, Quinn was officially recognised as too sick to work as the result of a ...”

“... that the aim of Union and Empire had all along been to foster this better class of Scottish and Welsh nationalism. Some in their audience are of course bound to think, if it has been so marvellous then might not more be better still? Ah, it would bring disaster! is the official reply – the agonising abyss of separatism etc. But just why would healthy ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack ...”

“... and the guarded admirer of Hitler, just as much as he means the Lloyd George who was the father of Welsh Disestablishment. And one must suppose that he comprehends FDR the originator of the war economy, and FDR the prime mover of American acquisition of European empires, in the avuncular figure who proposed the Tennessee Valley Authority. At any rate, keen ...”

“... Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he ...”

“... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...”

“... of all supernatural beliefs. How far it has failed to do so can be judged from the verdict of David Shankland, one of the most sympathetic analysts of Turkish faith and society, not to speak of the statesmanship of Erdogan himself: ‘There is not the slightest doubt,’ he writes in Islam and Society in Turkey, ‘that it is now dangerous for a man or ...”

“... flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so it’s ...”