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“... circuitry, no more outlandish than any of the spies, adventurers and agents provocateurs who criss-cross the continent. Those are in the book too: Alf and Pip Quarrender, whom Hicks meets on the boat, British intelligence agents with an eye on the Soviets; Egon Praediger, head of Croatian affairs at Interpol in Vienna, with a side interest in dealing ...”

“... a generation into the nuclear era. The scientific bureaucrat can no longer be laughed off as a cross between Professor Branestawm and Dr Strangelove. Exactly how scientific expertise should be employed in the affairs of the nation is a central question of modern politics. The government research laboratory is an intermediate social habitat, not quite ...”

“... back in. A nightmare, my own: to be locked in a dark, stuffy nursery cupboard with Boris, Michael, Nigel and their pals. England will become a place the young want to get out of, in search of fresh air and light.James ButlerThere is​ now a knot at the centre of British politics. If politicians push for inclusion in the European Economic Area, in the hope of ...”

“... the Dragon School and after lunch I walk across the playing-fields to look at the war memorial, a cross by the cricket pavilion on the bank of the river. Names of boys virtually cover the cross, not listed in an impersonal fashion with surname and initials but with the boy’s first name (and sometimes his nickname) written ...”

“... the opportunity to bring a new depth and perception to profiles, has done no better. A profile of Nigel Lawson, ‘maverick at Number 11’, at the time of the Chancellor’s last Mansion House speech, was no more than a review of his four years at the Treasury. Only Terry Coleman, in his extended Guardian interviews, gets close to his subjects. The ...”

“... came back from the edge so often does not mean the edge was not real, or that he was not ready to cross it, and he himself could always upskittle his poses with flashes of amazing candour: ‘What nonsense! I’ve never helped the Palestinians. They’ve helped me to live.’ Unlike many other literary players in the world of politics, Genet remembered the ...”

“... seen at its best in Hitler’s War, is a pyrotechnic display of skill in the interweaving of and cross-cutting between dozens of sources, each from the pen or tongue of men pitted in the struggle of great events. But the effect, wonderful as it usually is, depends for its force on our unfamiliarity with the story or the material and often both. Here the ...”

“... posed in front of a provincial isolation hospital: period domesticity verging on John Wyndham or Nigel Kneale. Conventional pieties. The dress, the white shirt and ironed tie, the pipe. Such serenity summons up, for a generation queasy with paranoia, biological experiments, government-funded research, something nasty behind metal-frame ...”

“... be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a ...”

“... bed I had a filing cabinet with cuttings from British newspapers by Ryan Gilbey, Jonathan Romney, Nigel Andrews, Anne Billson. There was also Adam Mars-Jones, writing in the Independent and then the Times. Like Kael, Mars-Jones could see the point of Spielberg without overlooking his weaknesses. Both described being a regular film reviewer as ‘the best job ...”

“... his pigs had the fever. ‘If it goes on much longer it will ruin me,’ he said.When I arrived at Nigel Rowe’s farm near Dedham only the weather was Constable-like. Out of his window the fields were bare and flat. ‘European pig meat is cheaper to produce,’ he said, ‘because we have higher standards and higher production costs. As soon as foreign bacon ...”

“... ought to have as much contempt for Boris Johnson’s Faragist Conservative Party as he does for Nigel Farage himself. And yet he appears to be doing his utmost to steer it to greater power. The work of Victor, and those grand 20th-century military bureaucrats Cummings idolises, is far closer to the data-amenable world of problem/solution than modern ...”

“... 84 linen tablecloths, 800 napkins and 47 finger bowls. Though the Corsair carried enough coal to cross the Atlantic, Morgan often sent her ahead while he travelled to Europe on White Star liners. The Corsair was used for taking friends on cruises in the Mediterranean and along the coast of Italy, and, on the return home, to steam out to pick his party up ...”

“... constructed by the murderer – they can turn the detective into a literary critic. In that novel Nigel Strangeways realises the truth after he has read the diary and thought about its phrasing and the context of his discovery of it, reading the text and reading between the lines in the same way the reader is meant to read any detective story.It’s all very ...”

“... hours. (With another hour thrown in to detour recent excavations, schlep the peninsula path and cross the odd motorway.) How long could it take on public transport? The Millennium Experience copywriters spoke with breathtaking self-confidence of a ‘12-minute’ ride from the centre of town (by helicopter presumably). The diggings on the peninsula (a ...”