“... international capital requirements. At a private dinner in London in September 1986 with Robin Leigh-Pemberton, governor of the Bank of England, and three of his officials, Volcker found he had an ally. Margaret Thatcher’s ‘big bang’ reforms to the City of London were due to come into effect the following month, and the Bank felt the need to ...”

“... Drummond Street is earmarked to be the entrance for lorries into the site, hundreds of them every day, backing up along the narrow street, making things impossible for Diwana and the half-dozen or so other restaurants. The Euston Arch in 1955 In the mid-19th century, the construction in quick succession of Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras resulted ...”

“... if at all, as a paranoid scold who thought that Superman was potentially fascist, that Batman and Robin could be construed as positive gay role models, and that Wonder Woman’s early adventures had a bondage subtext. (Never mind that such views, without the disapproval of gay role models, have since become received wisdom among ...”

“... funny’, as he had to be ready to do imitations of famous black singers, a football team or Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees.Elton and Bernie worked fast: ‘Bernie got the lyrics to “Your Song” over breakfast one morning in Frome Court, handed them to me and I wrote the music in 15 minutes flat.’ He didn’t go around with melodies in his head. ‘I ...”

“... of the Puget Sound urban corridor. Poujade – and Jean-Marie Le Pen – would have had a field day here; as, I’m afraid, will the McCain-Palin ticket in November. Until now, the political leaders who’ve used the movement to their electoral advantage have come to it as outsiders. Reagan the Hollywood actor, Perot the data-processing ...”

“... the canal as her older sister, Stephanie, looks on. I have gone to the bookstore on publication day in my pyjamas and asked them to unbox the new one; it’s back there, I know it. I have twice fumbled through The Biographer’s Tale (2000), a book which seems to take place entirely in a filing cabinet (don’t worry, there are also sadistic pictures). If ...”

“... as a child), he sneered at Hugh Gaitskell for not having any medals to wear on Remembrance Day and he loathed Herbert Morrison, his first boss in the wartime coalition, for having been a conscientious objector in the First World War, calling him ‘a dirty little cockney guttersnipe’. Macmillan’s diary is spattered with abuse of other public ...”

“... to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it. ‘It was going to be a bad day,’ Darling says with dry understatement. Brown adopts a different approach. His starting point is Friday, 8 May 2009. He picks it because it was an ordinary day in the life of a prime minister, and he wants us to know how ...”

“... latrine below the monks’ dormitory. With a lighting cameraman this would have taken most of the day, but brought up in the brisker school of music video Ben Taylor, who looks not long out of school himself, polishes off the whole sequence in a couple of hours. 10 May. Filling a pot with water to take a huge bunch of peonies L. has sent for my birthday I ...”

“... It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the GLC. One day, he had found himself taking the Underground in the company of a Tory MP. The arriving train was heavily congested and the unaccustomed Tory – who may or may not have been Alan Clark – recoiled from the throng revealed by the opening doors, suggesting ...”

“... in every way from the whoop-it-up trad jazz Abels. Trad – hugely and improbably popular in its day – had a predominantly middle to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to ...”

“... and marshmallow. By some estimates, 150,000 Choco Pies were being dispensed in Kaesong every day. Stripped of its cuteness, the story contains two lessons. The first is a reminder of what should be obvious: ordinary North Koreans are in most ways just like everyone else. For all their affected concern for human rights, this is overlooked with depressing ...”

“... detail and no quarrelling with the evidence. If the report says subject X showed up in place Y on day Z, in it goes, even if you know subject X had been buried in a distant city a month before. That report, as given, means something and you can never know what, for sure, until the end of time, if then. The central thing to understand is the primacy of ...”

“... the movement to ‘reform’ them turned the endowment to providing relatively cheap fee-paying day schools for the middle class, with pressure groups making sure that fees were not so low as to encourage a large artisan entry. Parts of the original endowments were used to provide bursaries for those who wished to go to university. A few boys from the ...”

“... of Congresses, built at a truly frantic rate by the Chinese, who ran 24-hour shifts, working all day in the pitiless heat and then all night by floodlight. The Guineans gawped at such efforts (which they would never have dreamt of making themselves), but took the fact of competition in their stride. There was even a period when Mongolia entered the ...”