“... party, he calmly told Nigel Corner, the richest boy at school and son of the owner of North East Steel Seating, who’d been boasting about having an indoor swimming pool installed at his house, ‘Nigel, we don’t all possess your amenities.’ At ten, he somehow got lost in Newcastle, found his own way back to Durham on the train and mysteriously brought ...”

“... of what farming has meant in this country. Farming – more even than coal, more than ships, steel, or Posh and Becks – is at the centre of who British people think they are. It has a heady, long-standing, romantic and sworn place in the cultural imagination: the death of farming will not be an easy one in the green and pleasant land. Even ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... commissioned a comprehensive survey of refugee movements. To superintend the project, it appointed John Hope Simpson, a persuasive and highly energetic man who had worked in India and Palestine, directed National Food Relief policy in China and served as vice-president of the Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens. Simpson’s mainstay in France was ...”

“... and Luxembourg – derived from the Schuman Plan of 1950, which set up the European Coal and Steel Community, to the broader European Economic Community, or ‘Common Market’, created by the same Six with the Treaty of Rome seven years later. Under the treaty, a permanent Commission situated in Brussels, its personnel appointed by the member ...”

“... the small violet or cherry-coloured pieces of paper curled up through the carefully etched slab of steel that lay just the other side of the ornamental grille, and were torn off and handed to us. Certainty descended, and we progressed through the foyer, up the steps, into the cinema itself, unless there was a necessary detour through the long curtains into the ...”

“... That’s what he said without prompting, and on the Wednesday evening he had a conversation with John Barradell, the City of London’s extremely well-connected town clerk. Barradell has what you might call a leading interest in the operations of London Resilience, the set of protocols that go into action during a major emergency in the capital. At this ...”