“... paramilitaries, who have been responsible for just under half of the civilian deaths caused by terrorism in the Province since 1969. The Government’s recent decision to ban the Ulster Defence Association has done something to restore the balance here by focusing attention on the violence claimed ...”

“... peace process’. I murmur that the attacks on civilians were unquestionably started by the Israelis and ask what the Government feels about the creation of yet more hundreds of thousands of refugees. The FO chap thinks that none of that is really relevant because the Hizballah are against the ‘peace process’, adding, however, that we are ...”

“... does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for political manipulation and deviousness. ‘Nobody has brought more professional skill to the debasement of British public life than you,’ Michael Heseltine recently taunted ...”

“... In the mid-Eighties, my family felt everything would be fine if I could just get something with a shirt and tie. My three elder brothers wore nailbags, overalls and aprons – the respective black robes of time-served apprenticeship – but even that world was going by the time it got to be my turn, and it was hoped that I might be found fit for the crisp shirt and tie of the clerical elect ...”

“... or insurance types; and out of their hometowns, incognito, hell-bent on a good time, they can be downright fun, if a little bingy. It’s just that it seems I’ve been in a Midwinter Conference of my own for a long time now. Enough is enough, I need to walk on the beach now and contemplate my next move. My father was a funeral director and three of my ...”

“... of course, was preemptively told a couple of years ago in the first volume of her memoirs to be published, The Downing Street Years. But told by whom? There hung over that weighty tome a spectral pall, the result of much collaborative assistance from ‘my memoirs team’. In one sense, however, it did not matter who ...”

“... anagram of 1789. Hazlitt exploited the coincidence in the political direction he favoured, by afterwards suggesting that the Lyrical Ballads was to English poetry what the Fall of the Bastille was to the Ancien Régime. Yet the volume was not so interpreted by contemporaries on its appearance in September 1798, when ...”

“... FBI laboratory. When he decided it was either a quarter of an inch too high or too low, it had to be redone.’ One girlish employee recalled: ‘he really liked pretty flowers. That was a good thing to give him. I personally or my group made sure that we gave him azaleas. That was his favourite.’ Most of the above comes from an official audit into ...”

“... shouldn’t matter, but which has mattered and therefore has to matter. In a world uncontaminated by injustice, we could regard heritable differences in skin pigmentation, physiognomy, hair texture and body morphology as superficial traits. We could be, as they say, ‘colour blind’, treating those traits, as we treat the ...”

“... Hopper and Gary Cooper – and the only thing he craved in those Pittsburgh days was the chance to be as lovable as Shirley Temple. The adult Warhol looked as much like death and lived as much by desire. A mobile presentation of 20th-century estrangement. A man in a wig in a season in hell. ‘A sphinx without a ...”

“... much to say about themselves. Locke, one might have thought before Cranston’s biography, would be an unlikely candidate for such treatment. In the case of Rousseau, however, nobody needed to be persuaded that Cranston’s subject had an engrossing vie intérieure. The author of the Confessions, the Dialogues and the ...”

“... Even the youngest boys in the room turned to stare, gazing at him ‘as if he were a statue’. By now, perhaps, too many page-three captions in the Sun and too many lectures from Andrea Dworkin have taken the impact out of the epithet ‘stunner’ and taught us to think of beauties as passive victims rather than masters of the gaze, but to the Greeks the ...”

“... Principia Mathematica) and Samuel Pepys (who, as President of the Royal Society, licensed it to be printed). It is one of the oddest couples in the history of thought: the man who, as a late 17th-century Cambridge student was heard to say, had ‘writt a book that neither he nor any body else understands’ and one of the multitude who understood scarcely a ...”

“... row which erupted less than twenty years ago over the proposal to replace the House of Lords by a Supreme Court for the United Kingdom may wonder not only why anyone should have opposed the move but how it was that the upper chamber of the legislature had become the country’s final court of appeal in the first place.At the dawn of the 21st century the ...”

“... presents rationality as our birthright. The human mind, he wrote, is a perfect computer corrupted by ‘incorrect data’. He urged readers to reflect on their lives and ask themselves: ‘Where is the error?’ With the help of a lay therapist, called an ‘auditor’, they could uncover early traumas – mothers who wanted to abort them, or slept with too ...”