“... other for forty years. We are gentlemen, so we say what we think. If I had been talking to Ted Heath, I would have been more polite.’ As Lewis remarks, this is reminiscent of the Gerald Brenan character who claimed that the great advantage of being born a gentleman was that one need never behave like one. It was no good: Macmillan wouldn’t have Butler ...”

“... champagne and brandy . . . to incapacitate any lesser man’, as his private secretary John Colville put it. He would talk to ministers with Toby, his budgie, alighting (and sometimes doing more than that) on their heads. He had frequent sleeps. His method of dealing with crises, he explained, was to ‘turn out the light, say “bugger ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”

“... nature is as much a political metaphor, an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare and Ted Hughes. Critics such as Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled Englishness in Clare and Hughes; the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is conflated with the ...”

“... half-whisper that someone called Colm Tóibín was in the library looking at the correspondence of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me ...”

“... for ‘When will my people be free?’‘For Scots with mixed [English and Scottish] parentage,’ John Lloyd wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, ‘a forced choice is uncomfortable. Should we, on the model of American blacks, claim “blackness” – or in this case Scottishness – as our dominant identity?’ Lloyd was not alone in feeling that his ...”

“... of them wrote in. Alma Fielding, a 34-year-old housewife from the South London suburb of Thornton Heath, rang the paper (a ghost didn’t seem a case for the police, she said). As she and her husband, Les, lay in bed, she told the journalist, there were strange happenings. A tumbler spontaneously shattered, a light bulb from the bedside lamp migrated, still ...”

“... mother bombarded him with advice; his tutor at Cambridge was the future archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift; and his godfather, the Earl of Bedford, provided him with a seat in Parliament. But he was short of money and had expensive tastes. He became a barrister at Gray’s Inn, rising rapidly to become a highly successful advocate and legal adviser to ...”

“... and it can be done fairly peacefully: either along the Grand Union Canal and across Hounslow Heath, or else via the Thames, Richmond Park, Twickenham and the River Crane. But these were walks that terminated at the terminals: now we would have to pass by the vast urban veldt. The first day, we followed the southerly route to Heathrow while the planes ...”

“... on disability benefit, so they wouldn’t show up in unemployment figures. In the early 1990s, John Major’s secretary of state for social security, Peter Lilley, began to focus on Invalidity Benefit, or, as he called it, ‘bad back benefit’. Announcing his intention to close down ‘the something-for-nothing society’ at the Conservative Party ...”

“... than giving him cause to think twice, a lost ballot confirms him in a sense of his own rectitude. John Buchan has an elderly cabinet minister say of Dominick Medina, a charismatic but deeply dangerous politician: ‘the point is has he a policy, something he wants to achieve, and has he the power of attaching a party to him?’ Has Dr Owen a policy? He has ...”

“... it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first leader of his party to have fitted carpets. White Heat contains a comprehensive collection of George Brown stories, although the best one remains the incident when the worse-for-wear foreign secretary was rejected by a gorgeously ...”

“... parents chose Heathfield because none of the girls had spots.’ Or, ‘My mother went to West Heath for tea once, for someone’s confirmation, and she sent me there entirely on the strength of that nice tea.’ The schools they went to could be happy, horsey places, or they could be monstrous, lawless places: they were usually something in ...”

“... among his many books, seems to give pride of place to a blockbuster history of the Cold War. Dr John Lewis, editor of the Modern Quarterly, so far from being, as Inglis would have it in one of his punchy characterisations, a ‘hard nut’ of the Communist Party, was an ex-Unitarian minister, much given to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical ...”

“... to the corporation in return for looking after public spaces, such as Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath, outside the City limits. The grant had been withdrawn by the Blair administration, which figured that the Corporation had more than enough cash at its disposal to keep giving back to the community even without the offset – what with the £100 million it ...”