“... Allowance, or – if you prefer – you could use it to pay for the BBC and throw in the wage bill of the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, Oxera’s method involved questionable assumptions about interest rates and the exact nature of the put option, and further analysis by economists at the Bank of England suggests that the true value of the option (and ...”

“... NHS glasses and studiously just-fell-out-of-bed hair. Damon Albarn tries to do a bit of a Pinkie Brown psych-ward glare but it’s pitiable – a strong breeze would knock him over. And is that shirt unironed? Mod! You mugging me off? It’s four art-school herberts leaning against a car that’s not their own in a world that’s not their own, that refers ...”

“... complex jostling over the rules. In the months leading up to the eventual signing of the bill by President Bush on 15 November 1990, there was intense lobbying for provisions that would favour mining and/or utility interests in particular states by introducing exceptions to the baseline allocation of 2.5lb of sulphur dioxide per million British ...”

“... year’s Bafta-winning single drama, the Stephen Frears/ Peter Morgan dramatisation of the Blair/ Brown relationship, The Deal). Despite Born’s claim that recent British TV drama had ‘a low tolerance for formal innovation’, many of the innovative devices associated with high-art drama are now staples of mass-market popular serials, from ...”

“... benefit from using them. We may have a rough understanding of scientific method, and even a rough Bill Brysonish sense of some of the science involved, but that is about it; our attitude contains significant components of faith and trust and incomprehension, while at the same time we are grateful for the wonders modern science has brought us. Our faith-based ...”

“... gay marriage (when it came to a vote, nearly half the parliamentary party anyhow opposed the bill, and it passed only with support from the opposition). The result was that Cameron went into the 2015 election with the referendum as a manifesto promise, and unexpectedly won it. The referendum went ahead just over a year later, on 23 June 2016. Cameron ...”

“... in violet ink on shiny paper so that the lettering was always slightly blurred. Each double bill had a page devoted to it, and it was a rule of our family, originating probably from my mother, who liked rules without reason, that only on a Thursday morning, and then with her permission, and under her direct supervision, could the programme be picked ...”

“... Doris was​ in her early forties when I arrived in my vile mustard-coloured coat with a brown velvet collar, my first ‘grown-up’ item of clothing. It was hung in the airing cupboard alongside some marijuana that Doris had grown in the garden her first summer in the house and was now drying out. I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope ...”

“... show wasn’t very interesting to a seven-year-old and, though they sometimes had pop stars on the bill, it was mostly dancers and novelty acts. Soon my loyalties switched to Juke Box Jury, where you could hear the latest releases and the panellists were slender and nice-looking, with beehive hairdos and Mod dresses, like my cousin Madeleine. They weren’t as ...”

“... and landed a job working at NBC for the Voice of America. He also began a stormy relationship with Bill Aalto, to whom he confided in an unpublished poem: ‘You promised we could make a kind of hell/for each other, and we did.’ Many years later Schuyler linked another love affair to his stepfather’s treatment: ‘B’s cruelty to me caused me to have a ...”

“... doctors, and – most troublesome of all – win the backing of a sceptical Cabinet. The NHS Bill received Royal Assent on 6 November 1946. The doctors, outraged at Bevan’s proposals, channelled their opposition through a profoundly reactionary BMA. Webster’s account of all this is sketchy, perhaps because he has covered the ground in previous ...”

“... club in the old Limehouse Town Hall. I attended this public debate and heard the Hackney solicitor Bill Parry-Davies describe, quietly, remorselessly, how, after a series of mysterious fires, Dalston Lane had lost its Victorian theatre and sections of Georgian terrace, facilitating the new transport hub that would service the vital axes, south to the ...”

“... a major overhaul in funding and provision. Andy Burnham, health secretary in the dying days of the Brown government, proposed a National Care Service, to be funded by a compulsory levy on estates. This remains the closest Britain has come to a solution. The plan collapsed in a cynical act of political arson, as Osborne saw a potent campaign tool in the ...”

“... you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed head of the home front, under you’ and that there could be no question of his predecessor, Butler, being accorded the title of deputy prime minister. Barely a year later, after the Suez debacle, he ...”

“... build a post-apocalyptic bunker in a remote part of New Zealand’s South Island was rejected, but Bill Gates, now only the world’s eighth richest person, has his own island in Belize. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the world’s fourth richest person, owns 98 per cent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, resort hotels and all, which he’s made an inhospitable place ...”