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“... civil disorder (he didn’t much care what sort) to disturb the law-abiding process of election day and throw doubt on any result that might be declared. If it was a close call, he had already indicated in speeches, tweets and interviews that he would do everything in his power to call it into question. On 31 October, the Saturday before the election, he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... prototypical pantomime dame was also a topical skit on a Covent Garden brothel-keeper, ‘Mother Douglas’, whose recent conversion to Methodism provided the kind of ready-made comedy of modern manners on which he thrived. All these were Foote star-turns in plays which he wrote, produced and – in the sketchy 18th-century sense of the word – directed. He ...”

“... with all the key players and, uniquely, had all their private telephone numbers. By the opening day, Monday, it was clear that the tide was running strongly for Kennedy. Calling on him to press the case for Johnson, Graham found him surprisingly receptive. But when Tuesday’s Washington Post reported that Johnson was in the picture angry black delegates ...”

“... wide (but fuller) than the Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals which heroically aims (one day) to bring all the age’s thirty thousand journals under bibliographic control. Although its range extends from Augustan to Modern, the BLM project shares with these other catalogues a central interest in the 19th century, and marks another forward leap in ...”

“... or even, substantially, a set of characters. It’s peopled by loosely acquainted present-day South Londoners, anxious, precariously employed, bright and lonely. Diverse by age, ethnicity and sexuality, they’re narrower by class: nobody well off enough to own a whole house, and nobody in real, urgent trouble. Although the same people flit in and out ...”