“... skilful and more explosive. It was an innovation wrought by the best professional bowlers of the day and it was against the laws. Despite a rearguard fight by the anti-professional traditionalists, the MCC, the premier club, recognising as always that some accommodation with the realities of the marketplace was essential if it was to preserve its ancient ...”

“... fortifying figures they looked, one remembers, on the eagerly collected cigarette cards of the day: keen-eyed, accipitrine thoroughbreds fated in later years to be played as the boobies of a ‘lovely war’ by a whole cluster of theatrical knights. After the Somme the War Cabinet had little enthusiasm for a repeat match. Lloyd George favoured sending ...”

“... Much later, dining with pop stars in Cheyne Walk, Lady Diana Cooper would mention that, in her day, post-prandial cocaine was served in salt-cellars. Hoare’s wartime London is a stage across which a troupe of affluent, cosmopolitan hipsters parade their unorthodoxy: the artist, drug addict, bisexual and sometime boxer Alvaro ‘Chile’ Guevara; Reginald ...”

“... to be men who once worked as juniors in his office, having been hand-picked at a very young age. Douglas Alexander became Brown’s researcher and speechwriter when he was in his early twenties. So did Ed Miliband. Ed Balls joined Brown when he was only 27, after a spell at the Financial Times, and they have been joined at the hip ever since. Despite the ...”

“... decided there and then to start a publishing house. They hired an office space occupied during the day by Martin Eve’s left-wing Merlin Press (the publisher of E.P. Thompson, Georg Lukacs and the Socialist Register). In the evenings, it became Allison & Busby. Their first venture was three cheap poetry paperbacks by James Reeves, James Grady and Libby ...”

“... the electorate outside the cities. Tory losses were bigger than expected, and by the end of the day looked very bad indeed: the cumulative loss was 485 seats; before the election the Mail had warned that anything over four hundred should be seen as a ‘disaster’.The Tories’ loss was so obvious that what has happened since seems puzzling. Many who had ...”

“... The First World War was the last conflict in which this style of command could be effective and Douglas Haig the last general who could exercise it. British generals in the Second World War, all of them junior officers in the First, knew that they would have to work at it a great deal harder if they were to persuade their notably undeferential troops to die ...”

“... unlawful funding of the Pergau Dam in Malaysia, involved not him but Lady Thatcher and the saintly Douglas Hurd. It is also said that Michael Howard has demeaned his high office by using legislation to embarrass the Opposition. Much is made in this regard of such monstrosities as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill and the new anti-terrorism measure ...”

“... successor, just as Eden later forced a smile of approval when Macmillan took over. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a pocket-sized Balfour, emulated him both in deferring to the Party’s wish for change at the top and in serving under his successor. That successor was Edward Heath, the first leader to be elected under elaborate new rules adopted by the ...”

“... to talk. Now that Android phones are being activated at a rate of more than half a million a day,4 Google suddenly has a vast and growing repository of spoken words, in every language on earth, and a much more powerful learning machine. If your phone mistranscribes what you say, you correct it by typing it in, and Google’s algorithms – once again ...”

“... Norman Tebbit announced the other day that Tony Blair’s government had made both obesity and Aids in this country much worse by doing ‘everything it can to promote buggery’. Aside from anything else, this comment might cause us to reflect (buggerishly) on the England beloved of bigots like Tebbit and to see it as a land not only of warm beer and cricket on the village green, but also, more significantly, of generations of excellent buggers performing on radio, stage and television, warming the cockles of English hearts and occasionally laying down their trousers in pursuit of their genius ...”

“... Musing over Don Juan, Byron asked his banker and agent Douglas Kinnaird a rhetorical question: ‘Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis à vis? – on a table – and under it?’ Byron was onto something ...”

“... that he must have slept in it. Sleede took his measures: silently, as was his way. He vanished one day in search of a rare component of Damascus ink that was believed to induce erotic needs in the user and thus, when palmed on some lascivious Abwehr agent, to weaken willpower and concentration. Sleede was next heard of having left Beirut in a caique for the ...”

“... is much that is to be expected. At Archie and Clara’s wedding: ‘What other memories of that day could make it unique and lift it out of the other 355 that made up 1975?’ Never mind that there are usually 365 days in a year: remembered time doesn’t exist in neat packets, one for every day, but as a continuum out of ...”

“... planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that outlaw behaviour had apparently cast on the youth of America. In a characteristically sideways rhetorical manoeuvre, he began with a disclaimer: What I say now is not to be ...”