“... piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ – has anyone else between Powell in 1968 and Boris Johnson in 2002 used the word ‘piccaninnies’? And what was it Johnson said about women in burkas? ‘It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letterboxes.’ Coincidental no doubt ...”

“... lore is shrewd, undeceived, uncondemning. For instance: Faulkner and the writer/producer Nunnally Johnson meet for the first time, Faulkner cuts his hand opening a pint of whisky, allows the blood to drip into his hat, swigs half the whisky, hands the bottle to Johnson, who drinks the other half, and the two men go off on a ...”

“... collapse assumed that the party’s backbenchers would take the opportunity to dispatch Johnson in its wake. Some deposed council leaders did call for his head. But, so far, letters to the chair of the 1922 Committee don’t seem to be pouring in. Perhaps Tory MPs are persuaded by the implausible argument that changing leaders while Russia’s war ...”

“... stop there: ‘The Labour Party cherishes its great partnerships – Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Douglas and Margaret Cole, the Callaghans, the Kinnocks, the Blairs. In this pantheon the touchingly loyal team of Michael and Jill may confidently be placed.’ ‘Michael and Jill’: how cosy. It seems unfair to bracket Glenys Kinnock, say, with Beatrice Webb ...”

“... in effect a siege economy, turning isolationist and perhaps neutral between East and West. As Douglas Eden and F.E. Short make clear in their patchy symposium on Political Change in Europe, these views are rare on the Continent. But objectives not unlike them were spelled out in Britain by ‘Labour’s Programme 1976’, the first comprehensive position ...”

“... over the battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time,’ Douglas Hurd wrote in his diary. Only months later the Poulson affair burst into public view. When Maudling refused to resign, the cabinet secretary cleverly insisted that the Metropolitan Police be involved in the inquiry. Since Maudling could hardly be the ...”

“... to privilege, who sought the company, within the Party, of fellow Wykehamists (Richard Crossman, Douglas Jay), other public school boys (Benn, Crosland) or public school wannabes like Roy Jenkins, and who, to top it all, was having an affair with an aristocratic Tory woman and loved nothing better than to dance the night away at the Gargoyle Club, the haunt ...”

“... and hapless – CREEP. The investigators also obtained warrants to search a room in a Howard Johnson motel across the street from the Watergate complex, which, the authorities surmised, had been used as a lookout by the burglars’ accomplice or accomplices. Here the police found an address book containing a note, ‘HH WH’, next to a telephone ...”

“... we can read it out of anything else we are doing.’ Sacks seems to find in conversation what Dr Johnson found at Charing Cross: ‘the full tide of human existence’. A good rule of thumb for detecting his departures from pure analysis is that his observations become particularly arresting. Consider what Sacks describes as ‘an awfully neat scene’ – a ...”

“... a student at Oxford there was much merriment in the Union at the childishness of Quintin’s son, Douglas Hogg. It seemed beyond belief that nature could do this to us twice or, more incredible still, that he could become a cabinet minister, but we have already had to accept that it is so. However low the ebb in Tory fortunes now, it makes sense to prepare ...”

“... to that of the Yugoslavians or Egyptians.’ The equally astute foreign affairs brain of Sir Alec Douglas-Home produced similar nonsense: ‘We are finished if the Middle East goes and Russia and India and China rule from Africa to the Pacific.’ Surely only in a post-imperial fantasy could India be imagined ruling in such a condominium ‘from Africa to the ...”

“... it was entirely her own fault. At which point the Treasury (Major, Lamont) and the Foreign Office (Douglas Hurd) realised that Thatcher was so weak, and so desperate to avoid yet more interest rate increases, that if they wanted to push her into the ERM, now was the time to do it. In this spirit she was told that a judicious series of leaks suggesting that ...”

“... Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style here but so did ...”

“... for housekeepers, repairs to tennis courts, swimming-pools; there’s even a suggestion that Douglas Hogg claimed for cleaning out his moat. The papers are suddenly full of pictures of Home Counties mansions set in acres of manicured lawns, straight out of Country Life, allegedly maintained at taxpayers’ expense. Proof, in case anyone has ...”

“... the concept of a new national dictionary that would supplant the pioneering work of Samuel Johnson, and rival the efforts of 19th-century European lexicographers. Peter Gilliver, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), characterises the movement that led to the formalisation of the Philological Society’s proposals as ‘a groundswell ...”