“... Birmingham. Fewer than half of its 350,000 citizens described themselves in the last census as ‘white British’. A third are foreign-born. It has almost as many Hindus as Muslims, and the irreligious are a larger group than the believers in any one of the big religions. All three of its MPs are Labour, among them Jon Ashworth, the shadow health ...”

“... to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential science adviser out of the cabinet – an effective and still ...”

“... point. Schröder’s appeal, pitched expressly to ‘the New Middle’, proved most effective with white-collar employees, where the SPD gained 6 per cent nationwide, and pulled over significant numbers of the self-employed, some of them former Green supporters. There was little gender variance in the vote, with the exception of young women under 24, who went ...”

“... not where it should be,’ he kept saying. We eventually found the church, which had a Norman nave and was therefore unlikely to have moved since the Ordnance Survey landed its symbol on the Landranger map.Thinking back on this, I wonder whether my father was already in the early stages of dementia. He was only in his mid-fifties, and it was a ...”

“... urged the Government to take advantage of the new French flexibility. In response, in July 1981, Norman Lamont, a minister at the Department of Industry, officially announced that a survey was underway of the relative costs of three different options: (1) immediate cancellation; (2) gradual rundown over a two to three-year period; (3) indefinite ...”

“... five two-bedroom flats on the upper storeys, one of which is Quinn’s. It was summer and red and white roses were blooming in the block’s communal gardens. Quinn showed me the fruit and vegetables the residents had planted in the spring: raspberries, strawberries, lettuce, onions, peas, beans, radishes. ‘Very optimistically a gentleman is trying to grow ...”

“... he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of ...”