“... Less​ than a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a travelling exhibition arrived in Kerch on the Crimean Peninsula. Filling several rooms in the Kerch museum, it was a display – a small selection – of the gifts laid at the feet of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev while he was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the second most powerful man in the world ...”

“... from the American Sixth Fleet would have hit any more.’ Healey and Gilmour – and indeed Edward Heath and James Callaghan – may be thought to have spoken for those two-thirds of poll respondents who decided that Mrs Thatcher had been guilty of a brutal misjudgment: and for the many people who believe that she overrode a rational understanding on the use ...”

“... for the last two decades. It has been the downfall of three governments – Wilson’s in 1970, Heath’s in 1974 and Callaghan’s in 1979. During that time, full employment and free collective bargaining became at last incompatible, and the former was in effect abandoned in 1968. As the union problem grew more acute, the relative decline of the British ...”

“... were for many people more important as politics than the parties led by Wilson and Callaghan, Heath and Thatcher. Sometimes he tells us just a little too much about the journey, how cloudy it was or how sunny, which mode of transport he used, what magazines he bought in W.H. Smith. But the point is well made when he writes: British politics in the ...”

“... election and British electoral behaviour in general had written these factors out of the script. Heath, Jowell and Curtice in their classic 1985 study, How Britain Votes, demonstrate the unique breakdown of the class divide in 1970, but simply shake their heads in wonder at it. Schoen had given the answer eight years before. Powell’s all-time peak, we ...”

“... crescent of Michael Searles’s Paragon – and while Dulwich is less monumental, it does have John Soane’s Picture Gallery and the buildings of Dulwich College, ranging from mannered Georgian to Barry’s lurid neo-Gothic, with the remnants of the Crystal Palace nearby and the bizarre tower of Charles Townsend’s Horniman Museum overlooking it ...”

“... in economic terms. Neither Harold Wilson’s Labour Administration, nor the Europhile Tory, Edward Heath, was capable of arresting national drift and decay. But then, at last, a saviour emerged. Like other saviours, she was an outsider, but all the more powerful for that. ‘I have only recently become a Conservative,’ declared Keith Joseph, one of ...”

“... On a June night in 1917, in his home at Walton Heath in Surrey, the Prime Minister asked to be roused at 3 a.m., because there was something he did not want to miss: the big bang from afar which would signify that British sappers had blown the top off the German-held Messines ridge. The sound came through on schedule ...”

“... out of the wreckage of the old Fairfields yard. In 1971 it was allowed to go ‘bankrupt’ by the Heath Government. The work-force responded with unexpected spirit, occupied the yards as a ‘work-in’, and mobilised much support throughout Scotland. The Government, taken aback, in due course negotiated a sort of settlement, partly with the American ...”

“... that she was a politician. She had survived a near death experience as education secretary in the Heath government, when her decision to scrap free milk in primary schools for children aged seven and over made her for a while the most unpopular politician in the country (‘Milksnatcher’). It had been a grisly time and had tested even her energy and ...”

“... which encourages a suspicion that devil-worshippers have crept in from some local blasted heath. The idea is supported by the fact that a relic, the mummified hand of Barabbas, has been stolen, presumably for use in a necromantic ritual. In this time of Reformation, the superstitions of Catholics and witches are deliberately conflated. Prior to ...”

“... Sir John Junor made his reputation mainly as the man prepared to be more bitchy about famous people than any other newspaper columnist. This was the basis on which he conducted his column on the Sunday Express, the paper he also edited for 32 years, and which underpins its less successful appearance nowadays in the Mail on Sunday ...”

“... become active in the squatting and claimants’ movements. During the first year of the 1970-74 Heath government, a series of bombs was planted and responsibility claimed by a group called the Angry Brigade, the language of whose communiqués (identified by a stamp made from a John Bull printing set) led the Met Bomb ...”

“... which it represents is quite remarkable. If Jeffrey Archer embodies rebounding success, John Stonehouse’s book breathes failure. Stripped down, Ralph is the story of a successful politician who grows restless with his good life, gets into a terrible pickle, assumes a false identity, escapes and comes to a disastrous end. It’s not, one might ...”