“... on 26 April 1564. The actual date of his birth is unknown. The convention that it was 23 April, St George’s Day, is a wishful synchronicity first mooted in the 18th century; Thomas De Quincey’s counter-suggestion, that the date chosen for his granddaughter’s wedding – 22 April – commemorated his birthday, is attractive. He was one of 39 Stratford ...”

“... Views on Everything (‘Yes, Terry, I do know all the lesser-known Handel operas. I told Andrew Porter he was right – they are the greatest of musical masterpieces’). I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first visit to Bayreuth. Schwärmerei time for T-Ball.The Sarajevo obsession revealed itself early on: in fact, inspired the great ...”

“... his Lincoln green beanie pulled right down, his hipstermonk beard, explained that his partner, Andrew, was the official guardian of the building. He had lived here now for a year and eight months. He was interested in photography and performance – and, in the wake of the recent excavation, history. The four-day removal of Hackney earth led the collective ...”

“... the vast power differential between central and local government: as chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne spent plenty of time talking about devolving new powers from Westminster in order to create a Northern Powerhouse, but his most effective act of power-sharing was to transfer the burden of responsibility for deficit reduction onto councils, which ...”

“... Obama had arranged for a portrait of Harriet Tubman, the former slave and 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 ...”

“... in November. In Washington at the end of September, Macmillan saw Eisenhower, Dulles and George Humphrey, the US treasury secretary. Yet he still could not grasp that, in Humphrey’s words after the invasion, ‘You’ll not get a dime out of the US government until you’ve gotten out of Suez.’ Roger Makins, Macmillan’s private secretary, who ...”

“... à la Nato has been a peppery dish. There were several chefs involved: Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their exemplar Tony Blair. They all wanted to convert the populace to an enlightened internationalism, but along the way they forgot to talk us out of nationalism. The military operations that dismantled Yugoslavia and overthrew ...”

“... care. Social care budgets, outsourced and administered through local authorities, collapsed during George Osborne’s austerity decade. In October, the County Councils Network, representing 36 mostly Tory administrations, warned of care providers abandoning contracts, chronic staff shortages and an impending £3.7 billion in additional costs as a result of ...”

“... into the major leagues of bestsellerdom and landed him on the cover of Time, his wheaty, squinty, Andrew Wyeth-esque head bearing solemn witness to ‘The Adulterous Society’. Prefaced with a quotation from Paul Tillich and with a high-gloss finish (‘his phallus sheer silver’ etc), Couples lent itself usefully to brow-furrowed editorial ponderings on ...”

“... mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to the city of Glasgow, which thought it was a useful site for a harbour. Shoals and shallows above that point in the river made Glasgow inaccessible to sea-going ships; they usually transferred their cargoes at ...”

“... who were purged by Johnson. No supposedly dictatorial previous prime minister, not Lloyd George, not Churchill, certainly not Thatcher, came anywhere close to this Stalinist ruthlessness.As we are now seeing, any centralisation of power tends also to centralise corruption. The lobbyists gather like flies or vultures round Number Ten, because no other ...”

“... Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat the pistol, therefore are essentially unscrupulous and unreliable.’ 30 August. A commercial for Carte D’Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have written. A family which includes the aged grandmother ...”

“... threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal. As Andrew Haldane, director of stability at the Bank of England, put it in a historical overview a few years ago, ‘there is one key difference between the situation today and that in the Middle Ages. Then, the biggest risk to the banks was from the ...”

“... on the heights, Carlyle’s writing has something essentially unserious about it, as of a man (so Andrew Lang remarked) ‘talking angrily and vehemently to himself’. When he was still young, Carlyle confessed in his notebooks that the world had lost its solidity for him. ‘I attend to few things as I was wont: few things have any interest for me; I live ...”

“... The boys worked together on a student newspaper and in student politics. His younger brother, Andrew, took time out from his own media career to work as an adviser to Gordon when he first became an MP. These were the relationships he cherished: permanent bonds with people who will look out for you regardless. The ones he mistrusted were those based on ...”