“... racism (isn’t it hard to hear English spoken on a train nowadays?). But of course Nigel can’t really be a racist, can he, because he’s got a German wife? (Except that she’s now chucked him out for the Usual Reasons.) Without Farage’s covert and overt endorsement, the smothered bonfire of xenophobia would not have burst into open flame ...”

“... What was​ Nigel Farage before he was Reform UK, before he was the Brexit Party, before he was Ukip? Farage insists that he started out as a run-of-the-mill Tory – just another true-blue Thatcherite – until the Conservative Party’s craven attitude towards Europe made it impossible for him to keep the faith ...”

“... too. 20 January. Note how much pleasure I get from anemones. I love their Victorian colours, their green ruffs and how, furry as chestnuts, the blooms gradually open and in so doing turn and arrange themselves in the vase, still retaining their beauty even when almost dead, at every stage of their life delightful. I used to like freesias for their scent (and ...”

“... in the park on his own. Some of the Shanks and Guns chased him and one of them, 16-year-old Dale Green, stabbed Pearton, who’d got as far as the main road on the edge of the park. He staggered into a takeaway, where he died not long afterwards. Three of the Shanks and Guns boys were given mandatory life sentences for Pearton’s murder and four for ...”

“... estate had put up for sale to avoid death duties. Lady Sackville, described by her grandson Nigel Nicolson as having ‘made a corner in millionaires and lonely elderly artists’ (among them Kipling, Lord Kitchener, W.W. Astor, Rodin, Lutyens and Henry Ford), was determined to get the painting back. She also hoped that Morgan would buy ...”

“... in which the cabinet meets pitiful, with its chandeliers and mantelpiece carriage clock and long green baize table. The blog post has pictures meant to show how old-fashioned it is compared to Nasa’s Mission Control, or the control centres for power grids and the Large Hadron Collider, with their open-plan seating and banks of screens that show everyone ...”

“... pubs, went for £239 million. A template had been established. In 1999 they teamed up with Philip Green to buy the retail firm Sears, which owned a number of high-street clothing chains and a mail-order business. These were all sold within six months, making the brothers and Green some £250 million, twice the amount they ...”

“... Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly ...”

“... at the Connaught for John Gielgud’s 90th birthday given by Alec Guinness. John G. in an olive-green corduroy suit, elbows pressed firmly into his sides, hands clasped over his tummy, smiling and giggling and bubbling over with things to say and (except for a small fading of the voice) no different from when I first met him twenty-five years ago. Dame Judi ...”

“... that the party was seen to represent ‘what might be termed the capital gains classes’? Why, Nigel Lawson, who twenty years later seemed pretty much at ease with loadsamoney, capital gains conservatism when at the helm of the exchequer. Lawson, it transpires, was something of a slow developer as a Thatcherite, and as late as 1974 favoured an electoral ...”

“... couldn’t be an apparatchik who would simply rehearse the official credo. The MEP we hit on was Nigel Farage, chairman of the United Kingdom Independence Party. Although he was a City metal futures trader rather than a professional politician, he could walk and talk polished sound-bites at the same time. Best of all, and in sharp contrast to other potential ...”

“... warning to immigrants in a place, once Labour through and through, that has fallen hard for Nigel Farage. Blyth was for generations a skilled labourers’ town, a place of shipbuilding, coal shipping and coal mining. But these old industries have vanished as completely as if they were never there, and most of the people who worked in them are ...”

“... as an experiment I tried some yellow stain on a small patch and this turned the wall a vibrant green, too strong I’m sure for many people but for me ideal, so that’s how I did the whole room. The study next door I did differently using water-based stains and as the walls here were lime plaster too I painted them in a mixture of umber and orange, yellow ...”

“... madonna of bother, into everlasting power.Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992 The picture which Nigel Lawson draws of Thatcher herself is a remarkable testimony to the manner in which her government’s grand strategy was determined. Increasingly, ideas were translated into policy via will, whim and pique. The advice of responsible ministers was superseded ...”

“... Street. She had over-promoted him to be foreign secretary and then, following the resignation of Nigel Lawson, quickly moved him to be chancellor, where he was more at home. Her hatred of Heseltine, who was the very last person she wanted to succeed her, had three primary causes. She was still hurt by his open treachery during the Westland affair in ...”