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“... His half-sister – he is a child of divorce and of name-change, just like his political sibling Bill Clinton – is a self-proclaimed Sapphist. In one chapter of this book Gingrich calls with an apparently straight face for abstention from pre-marital sex. But could anyone except an amoral child of the counter-culture have pulled off the ‘Republican ...”

“... aid to poverty relief, thereby making impossible a repeat of earlier scandals. ‘A useful little Bill,’ Short whispered to me as we sat on the front bench. ‘It makes impossible many of the things that the Foreign Office keep pressing us to do.’ It went through with the enthusiastic support of the Tory opposition, whose spokesman even had the nerve to ...”

“... knowing John Kerry, and not quite liking him either. Heavily supported by Edward Kennedy (and by Bill Clinton since the Wesley Clark machine puffed its last), Kerry is famous for having none of Kennedy’s backslapping, song-singing, law-making brio, and very little of Clinton’s natural empathy and charisma. People noticed Kerry, they even trusted him, but ...”

“... his £750, the sum allowed for the purchase of a TV set. He’s since said that submitting the bill to the Fees Office was ‘a bit daft’ – a good phrase for the ACA itself, which was introduced in more or less its present form as a temporary fudge under Thatcher and was meant to boost MPs’ salaries while saving them from the embarrassment of passing ...”

“... he signed the Wagner Act that guaranteed those rights); his ‘share the wealth tax’ bill of 1935 was more symbol than substance, a gesture intended to calm the challenge posed from the left by Long. Still, he was a working-class hero – ‘the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch’, as one ...”

“... Committee, the former secretary of state George Schultz, the former secretaries of defence Bill Perry and Jim Mattis, and even Henry Kissinger, none of whom had any knowledge of haematology or phlebotomy, but all of whom could provide a gateway to lucrative Pentagon contracts. Theranos’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, even courted Special Operations ...”

“... number of Americans, known as Anti-Federalists, warned of impending tyranny. To mollify them, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, protecting Americans’ essential liberties against abuses of national power. Initially, no clear connection existed between freedom, whiteness and fear of centralised authority. (A large majority of the presidents ...”

“... of Richard ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon, George ‘Read my lips: no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The ...”

“... eye than abortion. In Britain abortion was legalised as a result of David Steel’s Abortion Bill of 1967, but in the US abortion rights have never had democratic legitimacy of this kind, resting instead on the 7-2 decision reached by nine male judges in Roe v. Wade (1973). The justices managed to establish abortion rights in the absence of legislative ...”

“... the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from a true bill. Churchill, well aware of this, wanted the Nazi leaders, when they were finally captured, to be taken out and shot. Roosevelt initially agreed. It was Stalin, who had found that trials could be exceedingly satisfactory in both procedure and outcome, who ...”

“... of Christian Socialism, biographies of Stafford Cripps and – strange conjunction – Glenda Jackson, a two-volume ‘biography’ of Parliament, a critique of the British aristocracy, a history of ten gay MPs who opposed appeasement and, only last year, a book called Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament. Bryant was also the first gay MP to ...”

“... no suggestion that Mr McGregor was involved in the decision. Other former ministers such as Robert Jackson, Tim Yeo and Robert Key have obtained jobs since leaving the government. Earlier this year, the current Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and MP, Dame Angela Rumbold, was forced vigorously to defend her £12,000 salary with a commercial lobbyist, after ...”

“... to Augustus Hervey, now Earl of Bristol. In 1774 the duke’s sister succeeded in putting a bill through Chancery to have his will invalidated on the grounds of his widow’s bigamy. This sort of scandal was meat and drink to Foote, and there soon wafted out news, through the usual channels of clubland and newspaper gossip, that he was at work on a new ...”

“... Baron’s ill-repute was such that, even if 450 new peers had been needed to give the Parliament Bill a majority, he would have been excluded from the list by royal command. These may be ranked as small imprudences, however, and when they are set beside Lord Randolph Churchill’s relationship with Lord Rothschild no decline in standards is discernible. If ...”

“... Conservative Party has now said it wants to repeal the Human Rights Act, and replace it with a new bill of rights that would better reflect the traditional freedoms the people of this island are presumed to care about. The Tory charter would reaffirm the primacy of individual freedom and empower the individual to resist overweening state power. However popular ...”