“... of quangos. It is now a very long time since the Report on Non-Departmental Public Bodies by Sir Leo Pliatzky was welcomed by the newly appointed Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher on account of its scathing attack on the quango culture in modern Britain. A recent report put the amount of public money disbursed by such bodies after 15 years of Tory rule at £41.7 ...”

“... beauties of cricket as it is played in Pakistan. But it is his insistence on truth-telling that marks him out among political commentators as ‘obsessive’, ‘erratic’, or ‘eccentric’. It’s not that others fail to mention the lies and obfuscations of the politicians they write about. As Oborne points out, both John Rentoul’s book on Tony Blair ...”

“... the men are sitting around the bed of one of their friends when Mr Power remarks of Pope Leo XIII: ‘I often heard he was one of the most intellectual men in Europe. I mean apart from his being Pope.’ ‘So he was,’ said Mr Cunningham, ‘if not the most so. His motto, you know, as Pope, was Lux upon Lux – Light upon ...”

“... of government officials had links to a network of Straussians, students and followers of the late Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who strongly attacked what he saw as the corrosive relativism of modern thought and urged a return to the normative thinking of the ancients. Strauss’s views or versions of them were alive and well in the persons of William ...”

“... charm. Uncomplainingly eating the terrible food we offered him, he awarded imaginary Marx marks to the old Russophobe, making the assumption that he would have been a PPE student. (‘A beta-alpha for economics – no, I rather think a beta – but an alpha, definitely an alpha for politics.’) He gave his personal reasons for opposing Marxism (‘I ...”

“... resist the project, but he never really considered the outcome, that I’d be there, making marks on a page that would in some way represent this process. The issue of control never became real to Julian. He should have felt worried about what he was supplying, but he never did – he had in this, as in everything, a broad illusion of control. Only once ...”