“... Actually – and Gove’s new biographer Owen Bennett might have pointed this out – all I’d said was that with tsarist Russia as Britain’s major ally, with 40 per cent of British adult males denied the vote until the Reform Act of 1918, and with a German enemy that might not have been wholly democratic but certainly wasn’t a dictatorship, his ...”

“... years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his system. Whatever his reasons, he tries to discover in this well-crafted memoir, which is effectively a joint biography of his parents and himself – a difficult undertaking ...”

“... me Waiting in the Wings, Noël Coward’s play about a theatrical retirement home – Denville Hall, I suppose it is. He wants me to update it, though lest I should think this kind of thing beneath me what he says he wants is ‘a new perspective on the play’.The perspective will have to be a pretty distant one as it now seems a creaking piece all ...”

“... the ‘mainstream’ hope. The final sentence – ‘There is little that the Labour Party can do about it now: Militant is here to stay’ – sums up the book. It is a more powerful conclusion in that the evidence leading up to it is fairly presented and the author refrains from taking up any polemical stand himself. The Militant Michael Crick describes ...”

“... as Home Secretary before Her Majesty’s judges is appalling. He has lost a succession of cases to do with prisoners, immigrants and criminal injuries compensation. But his litany of defeats hides more than it reveals. Howard’s tenure at the Home Office has coincided both with the growing sloppiness of a Whitehall exhausted by perpetual Tory rule and with ...”

“... Theatre Tooting?’ She did so, explaining that the Granada – a Thirties supercinema with a hall of mirrors and a cyclorama of the night sky projected onto a ceiling – had been important to her as a child. She had thought it terrifically beautiful; it had also given her an intimation of what it was to play with style: ‘it’s a very, very difficult ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”

“... much more engrossing than any bedtime story, had unspooled in my head in perfect greyscale. (They do still, in childish defiance of the facts.) It wasn’t as if I’d seen many photographs of her as a girl – I still haven’t – but simply that the past, as I had perceived it, was defined by an absence of colour. No one ...”

“... with the Eighth Army, which Nancy had asserted in the House of Commons in 1944 was ‘dodging D-Day’. They returned singing to the tune of ‘Lili Marlene’: We’re the D-Day Dodgers, out in Italy, Always on the vino, always on the spree. Eighth Army scroungers and their tanks, We live in Rome among the Yanks: We ...”

“... you with the devil hand gesture you see at rock festivals. UCL students have been occupying a hall in the main building since 24 November, and are now a focal point for the national student protests. This is day eight. The occupation began at a ‘What Next?’ meeting on the day of the second student march when a group of UCL students voted to take over ...”

“... behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Has the press – or anyone else – any moral right to do this? Is an author’s identity an aspect of her personal privacy, to be disclosed or withheld as she chooses? Or is it information which belongs as much in the public domain as the books she writes? Anonymous and pseudonymous publication has a long ...”

“... Oxford 1968-9. In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the factional newspaper, or distributing the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink ...”

“... to serve her husband in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ...”

“... pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous – released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve ...”

“... not the case anymore, but you know, he’s a very engaging guy … And he’s a real star. Do brilliantly. And he got selected. Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an ...”