“... Government. Nor was this only because Prime Minister Blair and his jovial Health Secretary Frank Dobson had shrewdly chosen Homerton Hospital as an appropriate place for the announcement of the Government’s new health plans. Compared with their Tory predecessors, the New Labour lot seemed to my physiotherapist friend to be sensible, almost benign. This ...”

“... elected mayor equivalent to the leader of a council. Those arguing for an executive mayor included Michael Heseltine (the hammer of the GLC), the Evening Standard and Simon Jenkins, a long-standing critic of London council bungling. Opposition to the idea was led by Labour’s Environment spokesman, the former Camden councillor Frank ...”

“... of the European war. In I Confess, the war appears to suggest a reason why Clift’s character, Michael Logan, should become a Roman Catholic priest. The war had made these characters, giving them confidence, troubling them with memories. So it was perhaps that the 1950s were the decade of neurosis. For all their resistance to the ‘torn T-shirt ...”

“... that, in return, doctors would support the NHS. Bevan agreed, and an amending Act was drawn up. Michael Foot, in his recently republished biography of Bevan, concludes that ‘the Minister and the president of the Royal College of Physicians established an accord.’ It was an accord that split the profession (the BMA accused the College of ...”

“... who has ‘deformed the dreams’ of an entire generation in Vienna. She is a sort of Zuleika Dobson of the music halls, a large, coarse, kindly woman, constantly downing eel pies and bacon sandwiches and champagne, and she unfolds her story for an initially sceptical American reporter called Jack Walser. She was brought up in an East End brothel run by a ...”

“... civic discourse, posters appeared out of nowhere with the head of a man who wasn’t quite Frank Dobson. There was nothing peevish or pop-eyed about this citizen. The shirt was open-necked. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. No Londoner, according to the ...”

“... of stifling upper-middle class couth. Equally dominant in Arabella’s life is her brother, Michael, a poet who has absconded to Karachi. (In the gender-swapping way of the novel, nixing the mother in favour of the father, Michael is a better mouthpiece for Tonks than Arabella.) Caught between the poles of ‘art and ...”

“... that’s going to happen.’ As well as small fry like Conteh, the law catches big fish like Gary Dobson and David Norris. Although neither of them was found guilty of carrying out the stabbing that killed Stephen Lawrence when they were finally tried in 2011, new scientific evidence demonstrated they had been very close to Lawrence when he was attacked ...”

“... popular resentment, this time of political jobbery, after Millbank had chopper-dropped Frank Dobson in as the official Labour candidate. To his credit, Mullin recognises the tackiness of this fixing operation, and confronts Blair’s adviser Jonathan Powell, who blithely admits that ‘we fucked up . . . but we couldn’t allow a bozo like Livingstone ...”

“... brats. (Five years later Van Dyck was dead, aged only 42, and the next court appointee, William Dobson, painted the Prince of Wales with early Civil War alarums behind him: by that time, young Charles Stuart appears irredeemably devious.) Intuition beats cold reasoning: that was what Van Dyck inferred from his study of Titian. But his own intuitions were ...”

“... became even more marked: ‘For every reader of Henry James and D.H. Lawrence,’ the publisher Michael Joseph observed in 1925, ‘there are a hundred readers of Nat Gould and Ethel M. Dell.’ And if we look further forward into the interwar period, the peaks of the popular market become higher still, especially as represented by the thrillers of Edgar ...”

“... He had recently stepped down as director of public prosecutions when his local MP, Frank Dobson, announced his retirement. Starmer entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well as a popular local doctor. He drank ...”