“... one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this deplorable business is never to sanction the shooting of any video, however lofty its purpose, because once shot it will be shown. Professor Hodges seems to have arrived at his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s ...”

“... sat on a bleached-out walkway near London Bridge, staring into a gigantic billboard: ‘Pepsi Max: Max the Taste, Axe the Sugar.’ The concrete walkway sloped down from a modern block of offices labelled Colechurch House. It was the middle of the morning, cold, with hardly anyone around. I sat cross-legged with a torn ...”

“... and, though Astor replied robustly, the damaged relationship with Sieff and people such as Max Rayne hurt him and he tried for years to repair it. Astor sometimes said that he wished he’d been born a Jew; as it was, he was born into a family that considered itself part and parcel of the political establishment: he first met Eden in the 1930s at a ...”

“... no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate. There are max 3m in this country aged over eighty.’ And: ‘No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands!’ Predictably, Britain got the worst of all worlds: three national lockdowns; the second highest excess death rate among G7 countries ...”

“... was dark and drizzly by the time I got to Ellingham Hall. I stopped the car and got changed in a lane, putting a hoody over a T-shirt, while rabbits hopped in the headlamps. I’d been told there were journalists everywhere and indeed there were lights around the fields and sometimes helicopters overhead. I looked at the driveway under a full moon, it felt ...”