“... had any significance, he said the inhabitants of a Catholic country – as I write the remains of John Paul II are doing the local rounds, Pátzcuaro this afternoon, Morelia this evening – should know the answer to the question, and then added a gloss to the effect that God took six days to make the mess we live in, and ...”

“... more extraordinary that armed forces maintain impetus to attack despite heavy casualty rates. John Terraine’s The Right of the Line, a comprehensive, judicious and humane account of the RAF’s experience in the last European war, gives sympathetic attention to the stress experienced by aircrews in Bomber Command, which realised as time went on that men ...”

“... like it, and it’s all completely secret.’ We were joined by a man in his late twenties called John, with long curly hair and very blue eyes. He said: ‘Bush looked good today. He just talked to reporters at the White House and he was really on a roll. Speaking extemporaneously for a few minutes at a time. He’s good at that kind of back and forth. It ...”

“... time.) Out on parole and divorced from his first wife – she’d dumped him over the drugs – he took up with a clingy, bouffant-haired Filipina cocktail waitress called Diane, whom he married in 1957. (He wasn’t in love with her, he confesses. She was dumb and slovenly: ‘Diane – the Great Zeeeero.’ ‘I just wanted to have chicks I could ball when I ...”

“... sensation I had was of never being quite right. As I have said before in these pages, it took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or more exactly to feel less uncomfortable with, ‘Edward’, a foolishly English name yoked to the unmistakably Arabic family name ‘Said’. True, ‘Edward’ was for the Prince of Wales who cut so fine a ...”

“... Only six people would be there, and no electric light. That afternoon – it was a Saturday – we took the children to the pantomime. This year it was The Snow Queen. She was coldly glittery, and swirled around the stage in a platinum cloak with her comic entourage of ravens and spiders. The heroes were a boy and a brave, north-travelling girl. At one point ...”

“... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...”

“... tandem’. When did ‘decade-ism’ – history as wine gums – start? The first decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a coincidence that both have been characterised as fun-loving eras that chucked out staid manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae ...”

“... aspect; not for him another shared bottle in El Vino’s (‘Yes, why not?’) before the 8.10 took him home to Farnham. Why waste time drinking with the people from whom he was ‘least likely to glean information’? By ‘information’ Pincher means the stuff governments want to keep private. The encomia at his memoir’s start evoke a picture of him ...”

“... was deliberately allowed by Chiang Kai-shek; the most famous battle of the Long March never took place; Mao attacked India in 1962 with the support of the Soviet Union.Other scoops have important implications for Mao’s character. He poisoned a rival during the Yan’an period. He would send his own soldiers to be massacred if it would help him to move ...”

“... The admission of a professing Jew to Westminster would have occurred sooner or later: that it took place when it did, Dr Alderman writes, was due to a realisation of the potential usefulness of the Jews at the polls. ‘The Whig/Liberal connection wanted votes, and allowed itself to be seduced by the allure of Jewish votes.’ It is at some point during ...”

“... flocked to acclaim him, and according to Pushkin, even the dandies ‘gave up Château Lafitte and took to eating cabbage soup’. Then came probably the most dramatic moment in Moscow’s entire history. After the immensely bloody and costly battle of Borodino not far to the west, Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian commander-in-chief, decided with great reluctance ...”

“... before with The Porcupine, based on the trial of the Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov. John Banville did it in a roman à clef about Anthony Blunt in The Untouchable; and the Russian writer Olga Trifonova presented her persuasive and well-researched portrayal of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in the form of a novel. All these bio-fictions ...”

“... I’m being a singer.”’ There’s a crucial difference. Everyday British life in the 1980s took a turn towards the performative; style became a matter of exhibiting the right sort of ennui, and having the correct haircut. In our house, we were obsessed with Ferry’s hair, and at one point even my mother had a fringe falling over one eye. Fiona ...”

“... been grist to Brown’s mill – same old Tories looking after their own – but instead Brown took fright when he saw how popular it was. It was also Osborne who devised the political strategy to prise Brown out of office in 2010. He embraced the familiar Labour charge that the election offered a choice between Tory cuts and Labour spending. Yes, the ...”