“... back pain, his sometimes disastrous women and his two marriages. I like the sound of his brother, Sandy, his mother and many of his boyhood friends, on whom he doesn’t turn his back. But it’s a fucking big book, which I actually fell over yesterday on my birthday.24 May. It occurs to me that the whole course of English history would have been changed had ...”

“... lad’s rock’n’roll indoctrination, with Ridgeley as Rizzo and Michael as a chubby, unibrowed Sandy. Ridgeley might have been a fan of Adam Ant but he wasn’t one at twelve, as Gavin says he was: he was fifteen when Adam Ant starred in Derek Jarman’s 1978 punk film, Jubilee, which wouldn’t exactly have been the main picture at their local Odeon; the ...”

“... North and South Circular roads, and given London a second orbital motorway, was aborted by Boris Johnson: it was too closely associated with the former mayor, Ken Livingstone. Thames Gateway is a geographical area and a philosophy for which Johnson has no enthusiasm. Boris champions the Eagle comic wheeze of an ...”

“... Agnew farms just over four hundred acres on two parcels of land a couple of miles apart on the sandy soil of north Norfolk, near the market town of Fakenham. Agnew’s is a mixed farm, with sheep and chickens as well as crops, but it’s a measure of how conditions have changed that in the 1970s, his acreage would have been ample for an arable farmer (that ...”