“... The same list in 1987 saw knighthoods bestowed on Frank Gibb (chairman and chief executive of Taylor Woodrow which had given £35,000 to the Party in the previous financial year) and Derek Alun-Jones (a director of Royal Insurance, which had also given £35,000 the previous year). At the height of the Tory leadership crisis in November 1990, a group of ...”

“... when it came to the primary political battle of her life, which was to defeat socialism. When Simon Jenkins, then the editor of the Times, went to interview Thatcher at Chequers in the run-up to the leadership contest, he saw a copy of Heseltine’s latest book on the coffee table, stuffed with post-it notes. She told him she had been marking up what she ...”

“... and the first person in Tewkesbury to die as a result of the floods, 19-year-old Mitchell Taylor, had drowned while taking a short cut past the abbey on his way home from the pub. Passers-by heard him yelling for help – he couldn’t swim – and tried in vain, via mobile phone and the 999 centre, to guide a helicopter to him. His body was found a ...”

“... looking now. You know what used to happen when Dominic Cummings arranged to meet the journalist Simon Walters, formerly at the Daily Mail?’I frowned. ‘No, why would I, and why would he be doing that? Cummings had nothing to do with the media, did he? That was the head of Number 10 comms’s job.’She laughed. ‘You are so, so going to have your eyes ...”

“... woman’s flat’: ‘I washed my hands and the smell lasted for two days.’At the end of 1960 Simon Raven wrote a remarkable piece for Encounter on male prostitutes in London, distinguishing five types with the alert eye of a Mayhew addressing an undescribed trade. He deduces that all come from homes where they were unwanted or misunderstood. There are ...”

“... in London. People don’t live there. ‘Whole blocks in Kensington are dark at night,’ Simon Jenkins has written. The influx of new money and the fetishising of London’s prime real estate was distilled, for many, in the famous blue door in the film Notting Hill. Tourists now take photos of it, as the ‘ultimate’ London address, a pretty house ...”