“... visually: the top half of every page is occupied with Mr C’s ruminations on everything from Tony Blair to Bach, while the bottom half tracks his attempt to get off with a young woman decades younger than himself whose arse excited him when he observed it in the launderette of the building where they both live.)The ethical and, dare one say ...”

“... the years she had also stayed at the Barclays’ castle on the private island of Brecqhou (as did Tony Blair and David Cameron), and on their 197-foot yacht, the Lady Beatrice. Not long after her death, a bronze bust of Thatcher was installed in the Ritz’s lobby.By then the brothers had been in the hotel business for half a century. Born within ten minutes ...”

“... regulation, still attached to Birmingham and Cambridge Universities. Gently sunburned, with white hair and beard, he’s almost seventy; he has a Puckish energy, an enthusiasm more postgraduate than professorial, and a way of punctuating his conversation with a falsetto giggle. He once said that instead of RIP, the inscription on his gravestone should ...”

“... of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after my baby sister and a taller and somewhat younger nanny in a felt hat who took me to Victoria Park to feed the deer. The new house was at 78 Teignmouth Road, NW2, built around 1910 and located two-thirds of the way between ...”

“... and might not; and then, in noticeably poorer country, Irish Republic tricolours, their green-white-orange optimistically symbolising reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. Signs reading UDA and RIRA (both, in our understanding, illegal organisations) suggested that Ireland is not quite there yet, as did our first roadblock, between Armagh and ...”

“... purposes, under the nominal leadership of a disturbed but malleable liar placed in the White House by the CIA. The European allies were Washington’s puppets – Britain in particular, whose Foreign Secretary spoke and looked ‘like a Martian’. What cut Miletic to the quick was the jejune character of the US. ‘There is nothing in ...”

“... couldn’t possibly have been a lover. His massive pipe was scarcely [sic] out for a start – the White Cottage carpets reeked of pipe tobacco for twenty years ... he hadn’t that ‘mind’s recoil upon itself’ which makes possible passionate uncertainty, the loss of all gravity which goes with falling in love, the giving-of-oneself, the abandon. He was a ...”

“... American data could not effectively commercialise their technology without American approval. Tony Benn – then minister of technology in Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ administration – both marvelled and chafed at these arrangements. In November 1968, after a meeting with UK Atomic Energy Agency officials, he ...”

“... Clinton to do it.’ Marinkovic removed his dark blue peaked hat, ran his fingers over his cropped white hair and then replaced the hat, making the final adjustments with unreasonable care. He proffered one of his appalling cigarettes. His wife had more to say about this national curse. She was fond of Scripture and had discovered in the Bible what she took to ...”

“... writer and activist who helped found the ECP, is being trailed around the building by an old white sheepdog and a young black Labrador. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about industrial Manchester, begins with the disappearance of Mary’s aunt Esther, who has fallen in love with an army officer and become pregnant by him. When the officer ...”

“... so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in ...”

“... lip-service at least, from across the political spectrum. ‘The Britain of the elite is over,’ Tony Blair proclaimed on taking office in 1997. ‘The new Britain is a meritocracy where we break down the barriers of class, religion, race and culture.’ Like so much New Labour discourse, this strikes the upbeat note of a motivational talk, while the ...”

“... of the Conservative Party, they saw themselves very much as the party of law and order … and yet Tony Blair very comprehensively stripped them of that,’ Bob Quick, a former assistant commissioner of the Met, told Harper. This provoked ‘deep antipathy and resentment’ among Tories.Other developments also contributed to the souring of the ...”

“... speech to excoriate Kinnock for his pusillanimity. A future Labour government had waved the white flag before it had even arrived in office: ‘Exposed to the threat of nuclear blackmail,’ she told the conference, ‘there would be no option but surrender.’ She contrasted the weakness of Kinnock’s position with that of more robust Labour ...”

“... marrying into it. Vaughan’s father was ruddy-faced and in uniform. Julian later told me the white thing he was holding was a diplomatic bag. Filming was going on. There was always filming or the possibility of filming, which was odd for people who liked to think of themselves as hiding in the shadows. ‘You want a book to read?’ Sarah ...”