“... modernisation programme, rested on the assumption that improvements could come about only once service users had powers of exit similar to the ones they had in the private sector. The turnout in the 1992 general election was 78 per cent; nine years later, it was 59 per cent. Developing alongside these trends was a new political common sense about ...”

“... English political nation a great deal, but in 1603 the skilful diplomacy of her chief minister, Robert Cecil, escorted James VI, King of Scots, to the thrones of England and Ireland, with far less fuss than everyone had feared. The entire archipelago was for the first time in its history united under a single monarch, and moreover under the ruler of the ...”

“... in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), and then, after the Brexit referendum in 2016, by what Robert Crowcroft describes as a ‘contest’, ostensibly between proponents of popular and parliamentary sovereignty, ‘to make up the rules under which the country was governed’, though in truth the constitution provided ‘little more than a fig leaf’ for ...”

“... writes as pungently as anyone in modern journalism, but he has a weekly column to sustain, and Robert Maxwell is by no means as anxious about the fate of the Belgrano as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in ...”

“... judgment of many, including the historian Kai Bird in The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (2014), that Salameh was murdered not just because of Munich, but also because his close relationship with the CIA made him a point of contact between Washington and the PLO, a connection not at all to Israel’s liking. The​ existence of the Club ...”

“... expressed pity for the poor women on the street, but many viewed them with misogynist contempt. Robert Fabian, a former London superintendent, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on ...”

“... philosophy and history. Foot, Midgley and Murdoch then joined the war effort by entering the civil service. Murdoch had become a communist at Oxford and was sure the civil service wouldn’t want her, not ‘with a record like mine’. But she was taken on at the Treasury, and duly copied documents which she hid in a tree in ...”

“... to assistant secretary of the navy and then governor of New York. But he was also affected by service in Woodrow Wilson’s administration during the First World War. As he wrote in 1935, Wilson could appeal, as TR could not, to the ‘truly profound moral and social convictions’. On the big issues of what would make a better world, FDR remained, in ...”

“... asshole,” Cohn said, half-joking and smacking Trump gently on his arm. Cohn turned to a Secret Service agent. “I just hit the president. If you want to shoot me, go ahead.”’ It’s the ‘half-joking’ that’s the giveaway: it’s precisely what Cohn would tell himself after the event. But it’s not just Cohn. At other points the source is clearly ...”

“... landowners. Their side of the family were all employed in domestic labour, or in a version of the service industry. Lucie’s ability to take it to the next level, but also to the next class up, was both part of the trajectory and a break from it. The Lejeunes, my grandfather’s side, were all industrial workers and they socialised together at the many ...”

“... poets in these pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola ...”

“... the following morning.Short-term thinking also explains Cameron’s refusal to allow the civil service to prepare for a Leave victory, for fear it would look defeatist. After Theresa May replaced him as prime minister, it became clear that no one had any idea what to do, or even what could be done. ‘The British state had not done a shred of ...”

“... dates. The first plans for the cemetery were drawn up in 1920 and finalised two years later by Sir Robert Lorimer, an architect inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement and Scottish baronial architecture – nostalgia to soothe the pain of modernity. Like most such cemeteries, it is overlooked by a Cross of Sacrifice – an elongated cross usually set on an ...”

“... Can historical biography still be written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him ...”

“... he was going to bed. Macleod, incensed, announced, ‘I’m going to shoot you!’ and drawing his service revolver, began blasting away at the lock on Dawtry’s bedroom door. Finally he charged the door down before collapsing in an inebriated heap. The long-suffering Dawtry picked him up and put him to bed. Next morning the two men had an icily correct ...”