“... three acknowledged illegitimate children. ‘I wonder what Lady Wilde thought of her husband?’ John Butler Yeats wrote to his son in 1921. ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when her circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it – so that she could afford to be wise and tolerant.’ (Mrs Butt’s husband was ...”

“... in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the stores, even ...”

“... decent publicist, this time van Middelaar places at the head of his book an epigraph from Miles Davis. It reads: ‘I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.’ The politics of the EU in a one-liner.But the price for these moments of frankness has risen. Along with acknowledgment of the ‘coercive consensus’ of the Council meetings, the ...”

“... or gifts only 43 times since 2015, according to available records. By way of contrast, Robert Davis, the Conservative deputy leader of neighbouring Westminster Council, was entertained or received gifts 514 times in the same period. But in the days after the fire, Paget-Brown was portrayed, pretty much universally, as a greedy toff who was happy to put ...”