“... they buy the services, rather than being cast as monopoly suppliers’ – check. ‘Another very strong idea is that money follows patients’ – check. ‘Pay hospitals prospectively by diagnosis-related groups as our Medicare programme does’ – check. ‘Self-governing NHS trusts’ – check. What seems to have happened since 1985 is that Enthoven’s ...”

“... it’s a more visceral word, impossible to say without some amount of feeling, and conveys a strong reaction to what it generally disdains to name (indeed stresses its unnameability). Deep down the disgust is surely focused on the bodily facts of sex between men. ‘Filthy’, of course, occurring six times in each of Parker’s volumes, has a moral ...”

“... when it came to the primary political battle of her life, which was to defeat socialism. When Simon Jenkins, then the editor of the Times, went to interview Thatcher at Chequers in the run-up to the leadership contest, he saw a copy of Heseltine’s latest book on the coffee table, stuffed with post-it notes. She told him she had been marking up what she ...”

“... income by 2020. In Taking Power Back, his 2015 book calling for a renewal of local democracy, Simon Parker describes the consequences as ‘perhaps the biggest shift in the role of the British state since 1945’. There is currently a very real risk that Brexit will distract from austerity – no longer the disaster du jour – which will nonetheless ...”

“... in his pocket, carefully framed by the camera in a horseshoe of black-uniformed convicts hundreds strong, offering them redemption or death if they sign up to join the assault on Ukraine. ‘The first sin is deserting,’ he declares. ‘No one falls back. No one retreats. No one surrenders.’ In clip after clip, he accuses the Russian defence ministry of ...”

“... society. This issue has for historians its special focus in terms of undergraduates. As Joan Simon remarks, ‘in the history of the universities in England the late 16th century stands out as the age when a young man’s “university days” first came to be regarded as a period for the “sowing of wild oats” ... A gentleman of Renaissance England ...”

“... and other confections, among them Orwell, who put aside his loathing of British imperialism – so strong, according to William Empson, that he initially ‘felt Hitler’s war would be worthwhile if it spelt the end of the British Raj’ – to broadcast its merits to India. After attending a six-week training course dubbed ‘the Liars’ School’, he ...”

“... of the emerging Third World, signatories of the Bandung Pact of 1954, a group that expressed its strong desire not to be aligned with the US or the Soviet Union. An almost accidental decision, it proved to be one of the defining moments of the revolution. The French war in Algeria was at its height; the British war at Suez was three years away; much of ...”

“... she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local boys referred to Grenfell Tower as ‘the Moroccan flats’. ‘It was Rania’s habit to cook for everyone,’ her older sister Rasha told ...”