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“... that my first memories of the children I was taught with come. Particularly the girls – Libby Gordon, the Priestly girls, so pretty and talented. The boys – Alistair Scott, for example – vaguer. But I do remember wrestling with Alistair in the school playground – to what end, and for what reason if any, has long gone. The composite class I was in ...”

“... of people who have, literally, very little to say for themselves. On the other hand, you stay with Gordon Legge’s young, mainly unemployed Scots for their conversation. Even Archie, who doesn’t talk much, can think in his own words rather than the narrator’s. The action is desultory: a trip to Glasgow and a pub brawl are climaxes. For the most part, the ...”

“... goes to a different school, he is thrown out of the cinema (and misses the last episode of Flash Gordon) because of someone else’s misbehaviour, and his father becomes infatuated with another woman. Along the way he learns about sex and sees its consequences in a forced marriage. The book ends with Joby on a canal bank, persuading his father (who Joby ...”

“... loses. The Government has entered into a bitter tactical skirmish about whether it was Alastair Campbell who manipulated the evidence. But suppose he is totally and utterly exonerated of this specific charge. This simply sharpens the infinitely more damaging strategic issue: if Campbell did not exaggerate the case for ...”

“... low, actually.’ One of the lads, he has no problem with testicles. As soon as he met Alastair Campbell, he knew that he had ‘clanking great balls’. He admires Rupert Murdoch for the same reason: ‘He was an outsider, and he had balls.’ He also admires women who might be said to have balls, like Kate Garvey, his diary secretary: ‘She ran the diary ...”

“... Charlie Wilson, the sort of father you see by the hundred in France on Sunday outings ... [Gordon] Goody, nerves of steel and the wolfish handsomeness of the pack leader ... The events were so vividly in the minds of the actors that they remember, like Henry V at Agincourt, what feats they did that day.’ Never mind Agincourt, note the ‘little ...”

“... book, but I cannot believe that its subject would have liked it any better than he cared for John Campbell’s 1993 biography, Heath’s own copy of which is scrawled with angry marginalia – ‘Nonsense!’, ‘No!’ and ‘Wrong!’ Campbell’s book was less alluring in style, more detailed in its accounts of ...”

“... In her essay ‘Good Boys and Dead Girls’ Mary Gordon identifies the ‘American innocent’. She tracks him – young, restless and bad news for women – through the novels of Faulkner, Dreiser and Updike. ‘All that matters is that his heart must be pure, and he must move forward to the quest which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search for the unfettered self ...”

“... desperation. Britain’s Labour Party, which had spurned at least three opportunities to replace Gordon Brown with someone more palatable, smelled of exhaustion. Laws describes the various meetings that took place in the days following the election between the Lib Dem negotiating team and its Labour counterparts, to see if they could thrash out a deal. On ...”

“... Or in those seats with a high-minded middle class? Perhaps Oona King, Barbara Roche and Anne Campbell could ask him. (Indeed Oona King could ask herself what she thought was going to happen.) The prime minister’s self-indulgence should not be rewarded by another long spell in Downing Street. That is not the only thing to be said against his ...”

“... Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then came Lord Campbell, himself a chief justice, whose biographies of his predecessors became known as one of the new terrors of death, and whose Life of Mansfield contains at least one palpable fabrication. In the 20th century two scholars, Edmund Heward and ...”

“... but a plan which would allow business to go on while building proceeded. At the suggestion of Gordon Graham, then president of the RIBA, Lloyd’s put up money for what was in effect a limited competition – not for a design so much as for a plan of campaign. Although Lloyd’s themselves suggested a couple of names, the profession (in the form of the ...”

“... might come next. Blair felt he was really getting things done at the point when his struggle with Gordon Brown was over. But it wasn’t because he had worked out how to deal with an obstructive rival; it was because he had ultimately been defeated by him. He was liberated by having little left to lose. Obama has been increasingly willing to assert his ...”

“... of Mandelson is a consequence of his trade unionism and his friendship with Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown’s former press officer. The Chancellor might appear to outsiders as the willing servant of a free-market consensus which has cracked in those parts of the world – roughly one-third – currently in recession and worse, but to Routledge and others ...”

“... Howard Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy governor of the Bank of England, having just been involved in that same capacity in seeking a ...”