“... on the implications of that 1990 Sun headline (surely the longest Sun headline ever written) which said: ‘Britain has gone sex-crazy as red-hot lovers rush to do it in the great outdoors, say experts.’Much of this book belongs to one of those articles called ‘Fifty Amazing Things You Never Knew About the Weather’ (No 50: Did you know that yellow rain ...”

“... eating chocolate bars. We had exchanged a few words about the chocolate bars we preferred. M said she liked caramel-filled ones, I expressed a greater interest in dry biscuity ones, then we fell silent and I looked out across a field to a clump of trees by a stream . . . These trees gave off an impression of astonishing health and exuberance. They seemed ...”

“... with diminishing effect, until the last decade of the 17th century. The first thing that should be said about the current controversy is that nothing resembling press licensing – the prior authorisation of publications – is being proposed by anyone. Even in its strong form, regulation is concerned with redressing and in extreme cases penalising ...”

“... the Twenties. He made his name by devising a water filtration system to prevent epidemics. It is said that he demonstrated the effectiveness of his invention to Emperor Hirohito by urinating into his filter and inviting the Emperor to drink the result. Ishii’s filter was perhaps the doctor’s only benign contribution to mankind. After reading a report ...”

“... respond to a (dubbed) interview with Martin McGuinness in which Sinn Fein’s vice-president had said the ceasefire would endure ‘in all circumstances’. Mayhew said he thought what Martin had had to say was of great interest. Martin? Does this signify something? Meanwhile, in Belfast, reporters were pressing Adams on ...”

“... the same point. The modern city was ugly because it was irreligious and inhumane: these, Pugin said, are the shoddy buildings of a shoddy age. His examples were exaggerated, his logic was faulty, his grasp of history tenuous. But Contrasts spoke an important truth to a public anxious about rapidly expanding industrial cities, social change and ...”

“... When Sir Lewis Namier was lying on his death-bed, he is said to have looked up radiantly at his wife and declared: ‘What a pity! Yesterday was the first time I saw in my mind’s eye the Survey of Parliament as a whole.’ A pity indeed, for the insight allegedly offered to Namier on the point of death has never quite been afforded to any of his disciples and successors ...”

“... Press Secretary, must rank as the source closest to Mrs Thatcher. ‘I only wish,’ he has said, ‘I was as sophisticated, as devilishly clever and Machiavellian as some make out. Not even a combination of Einstein backed by the world’s most advanced computer could achieve the presentational coups with which we – indeed I – have been ...”

“... or four million people watched a ticker-tape parade. ‘Colonel Lindbergh, the city is yours,’ said the mayor. Lindbergh was 25. Two years later he married Anne Morrow, and on 1 March 1932 their son Charles Augustus junior was kidnapped from their home near Hopewell, New Jersey. Three months after that, the baby was found murdered in nearby woods. In early ...”

“... sold; auditions held for poetry readings; invitations sent out. The result was a grand gathering. Edward de Souza read some of Shelley’s political poems with tremendous force. The winner of the audition to read ‘Men of England’ was a young black woman. Lesley Saunders, a Greenham Common campaigner and local Labour Party member, read some of her ...”

“... he couldn’t do much except lie down below deck, unresponsive and helpless. After three months he said ‘he wanted to come home,’ and his wife, Laura, came to fetch him back to Norfolk. Back near Blakeney he was sometimes well enough to go out on still water in a dinghy, or sit in the sun carving toy boats, but he was often marooned indoors, too unwell to ...”

“... became fixated on a golden-haired British gossip columnist called Sheilah Graham, who had, he said, the look of ‘a young Zelda’. The creator of Jay Gatsby wasn’t slow to see through her persona. Sheilah Graham was actually Lily Shiel, the youngest child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, who had grown up in a Stepney Green slum. Fitzgerald took it on ...”

“... For after all, the inspiring motive for two of the other finest combatant poets of the Great War, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, was patriotism. One could, if one wished, even make Edward Thomas out to be a jingoist, for did he not write: But with the best and meanest Englishmen I am one in crying, God save England, lest ...”

“... Scotland’s languages, sometimes improved by collision with English. Probably he meant it when he said that, if there had to be an international language, it should be Italian. While one great hero was certainly MacDiarmid, whose ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ he’d carried with him all through the war, another was Gramsci, introduced to him by ...”

“... later told a similar story. A Protestant pastor who knew Ivan’s Russia but who wasn’t there said that Ivan’s men raped the women and, when they resisted, the tsar had them beaten, had their nails and tongues torn out, then impaled them on red-hot stakes. Jerome Horsey, an Englishman who knew Ivan and was familiar with his world, but of whose colourful ...”