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“... Davis not muffed his lines is almost as tantalising as the question of what might have happened if John Smith had lived. Davis’s campaign had been showing signs of weakness, but the conference speeches decisively shifted the narrative, turning him into the politician who had over-reached and Cameron into the natural-born leader. A Davis-led Conservative ...”

“... certainly workable policies – and they were effectively abandoned by Wilson, Callaghan and Brown on the night of the election victory when it was decided to give top priority to defending sterling. With that fateful decision went the best chance Labour may ever have; after 13 years of waiting and planning and passionate commitment, the Party simply ...”

“... a cleaning lady called Mrs Bacon, a News of the World reader who gossiped about suicide and ‘cut brown bread so thinly that its fibres had to be bonded by slabs of butter’. In the school holidays he was sent to stay with various uncles and aunts (‘Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle … Uncle Cecil, pharmacist. Wife: Auntie Rae. Uncle Edgar, dislikable ...”

“... gift of the violets indicates. As with most of Crane’s tales (‘The Blue Hotel’,‘A Dark-brown Dog’, ‘The Bride comes to Yellow Sky’) there is a period emphasis on Art Nouveau primary colours. Hawker’s young brother will pop up much later in The Catcher in the Rye as Holden Caulfield; for the ghosts that haunt Crane’s fiction live in the ...”

“... the government is not popularly elected, as the handover of prime ministerial office from Blair to Brown reminded us. The government is a political elite, a career oligarchy, appointed from within an elected (in our case, partly elected) Parliament. Members of the government are elected, if at all, only as members of Parliament, not as members of the ...”

“... is now a scheduled ancient monument tucked away in flat farmland, its whereabouts indicated by a brown road sign pointing across a field of beet (or so it was last autumn). The aqueduct is a fairly short affair; it carried the canal across a narrow, shallow river valley, and replaced an earlier one, still unfinished when it was swept away by a violent flood ...”

“... colour, becoming red with blood-orange streaks. I could see the nickel smelter itself, a dusty brown hulk of gnarly ducts, town-sized. Truck tyres the size of small cars lay in piles. The road was cut out of the steep red hills and huge nets held back landslides. Mining company double-decker Mercedes buses passed by carrying workers. There were company ...”

“... an independence referendum – ‘Bring it on,’ she said – but she was slapped down by Gordon Brown, under the advice of Alexander’s brother Douglas. Within months she was out of office, forced to resign after failing to declare a £950 donation from a Jersey-based businessman. For the SNP, even defeat has turned out to be a blessing: within weeks of ...”

“... Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in time? Reid: I left after Blair resigned. Last three years and Broon a total disaster. Me: I agree. But you think Blair would have ...”

“... of Desert Island Discs’ ten best episodes. Many included Yoko Ono on being hated and witnessing John Lennon’s murder, the actor Stephen Graham on his suicide attempt, Maya Angelou on childhood trauma, Simon Cowell boasting, Alfred Wainwright on his last walk in the Lakes as his eyes failed (‘the mountains wept for me that day’) and Tom Hanks moved to ...”

“... Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a sharp mind. His character owes something to Chesterton’s Father Brown, except that where Brown draws on insights into human nature deriving from years in the confessional, Shardlake’s speciality is the sifting and weighing of evidence.Like all the best detectives, Shardlake is also an ...”

“... to put together an anthology of Parliamentary applications for Private Eye’s Order of the Brown Nose would stumble before long on an obsequious supplementary question from David Evans, one of the very first Tories to make a million out of privatisation (in his case from rubbish collection). Again and again, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the ...”

“... as footnotes to the poem. (They are thickest among the writings of Pope’s lifelong enemy, John Dennis: ‘high voiced and never enough quoted’, as Pope has him.) And once the poem had first appeared to settle those stored-up scores, it would duly produce a further flurry of attacks and more material for Pope’s collection, more material for more ...”

“... he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’Nicholas Paget-Brown​ , who was then the leader of the council, lives alone not far from the Fulham Road. His gentle manners precede him, in the style of a decently prepped, slightly fogeyish man of the 1950s, and he acts as if he might find the modern world fascinating were ...”

“... like it, and it’s all completely secret.’ We were joined by a man in his late twenties called John, with long curly hair and very blue eyes. He said: ‘Bush looked good today. He just talked to reporters at the White House and he was really on a roll. Speaking extemporaneously for a few minutes at a time. He’s good at that kind of back and forth. It ...”