“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the kind of people who have expressed public support for UBI – Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Hillary Clinton – has led to scepticism on the left. The Basic Income Earth Network is so troubled by the free-for-all libertarian version of its ideas that it has adopted a resolution rejecting the anti-welfare state version of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mother, who responded to the 11-year-old’s opening lines – ‘“Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?” said Mrs Tompkins. “If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room”’ – by icily observing: ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ That put a stop to fiction for a time. But Lucretia Jones’s capacity to freeze ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... abolitionist, to replace Andrew Jackson, the slave owner known as the Indian Killer, on the $20 bill. Steve Mnuchin, the secretary of the treasury, states that this will not be possible until at least 2028 and probably not at all. Trump has a portrait of Jackson hanging in the Oval Office.*As his attacks on Cummings and Baltimore continue, the president ...”

“... calculating style of their son. Dunham was a resourceful single mother attracted to exotic brown men. Having returned to the East-West Center in 1963 to study anthropology, she met Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese graduate student who was easygoing and patient – the opposite of Barack Sr. They were married in March 1964. Little more than a year later, after ...”

“... no food to be had, and so walk back to the square where we have coffee and a sandwich. Paying the bill, I ask the woman at the counter the whereabouts of the sea, and she points me down the road. It’s now about eleven o’clock. And as I write these prosaic details down – the cashier, the time, the people sitting outside – I realise it’s in an effort ...”