“... his death, but maintains a degree of prudence even when showing off. ‘I went home with Nigel Davies to his flat in Curzon Street and had an amazing connection and etc etc etc.’Channon was drawn to men in his own elite circle, but the trend in these books is for well-to-do men to seek sex and romance outside their own class, among soldiers and working ...”

“... speaking, Glyn Mathias, a BBC political correspondent, was screaming, ‘Are you gay?’ at Ron Davies, the Secretary of State for Wales, who had resigned after being caught searching for the kindness of strangers on Clapham Common. The Director-General of the BBC, Sir John Birt, was knighted by Tony Blair and worked with and befriended Mandelson at London ...”

“... man’ begins to appear as artificial as Piltdown Man. Yet some good points are made. Trevor Davies and Adrian Sinfield, on the unemployed, where Scots are right to carry a chip on the shoulder, show that – as in the 1930s, they might have added – the social costs of unemployment have been ignored by the Government. They put forward the idea of a ...”

“... start turning a profit. The money invested by City businesses will turn to profit more quickly. As Michael Snyder, the Corporation’s head of policy, noted, Crossrail will stop the City from losing the £1 million a day it currently loses as a result of transport delays: one hundred and fifty days and the banks will be laughing all the way ...”

“... bonanza. The soft-spoken Californian rodent was attended by his sleepover pal and minder, Michael Jackson. We have heard it stated, quite accurately, that construction work on the Olympic Park has been carried out with few casualties. But cycle deaths are mounting, from the early casualties of the fresh-painted lanes at the base of the Bow ...”

“... to look at the series of British actions leading up to the massacre, in particular those of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab. Unlike Dyer, O’Dwyer could not be said to be a stupid man; he had a first in jurisprudence from Balliol. But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames ...”

“... wife, Virginia, later married Charles Lederer, the scriptwriter nephew of the mistress, Marion Davies. The couple spent a lot of time at Hearst’s castle, San Simeon. Herman Mankiewicz, who shared the script credit on Kane (rightly, according to both books), and who so feared that Welles would try to deprive him of this (wrongly, according to Ms ...”

“... There were already good biographies of Shaw, notably those of Frank Harris and Hesketh Pearson, both of whom knew Shaw and had the benefit of his energetic interventions. Pearson in particular will not be easily supplanted. Nevertheless the archives of the world are full of Shaviana inaccessible before his death, and because there had not been a serious attempt since 1956 – the centenary year – the Shaw Estate sensibly decided that the time had come for a new biography, and invited Mr Holroyd to write it ...”

“... slings and talked bilharzia and dysentery and the new arrival of Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits at Davies Bryan’s department store.The principle of living in a different country from the one you are actually living in was not foreign to Helen. After all, in Romania she had lived mostly in the comfortably upholstered civility of the Austro-Hungarian ...”

“... Douglas Furr, my private friend’. The only thing that gives him pause is when he takes Nigel Davies, a Tory MP, to ‘a Boy’s Ball where everyone was dressed as animals’ and wonders: ‘Is this Byzantium? The end, the eclipse of the empire.’Channon notes ‘what a nice man’ David Maxwell Fyfe is, and comments, with his usual gift for dud ...”

“... are lifted from the ground, I can see the soil beneath it glinting like moist flesh.’ Bill Parry-Davies, taking time off from a court battle with Hackney Council over the treatment by the developers Murphy of the last rind of Georgian façades on Dalston Lane, blew his saxophone from the pit in feisty lament. He’d told us earlier: ‘The conservation ...”

“... of this. 23 May. Ros Chatto, my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then ...”

“... likely that all errors will be enthusiastically owned? As the philosophers Joshua Parker and Ben Davies point out in a blog on blame and responsibility, there ‘will always be disincentives to owning up when you have risked a patient’s health. A no-blame culture cannot negate a doctor or nurse’s embarrassment or guilt at having risked a patient’s ...”