“... Kate O’Mara and when I next look lining up to meet Her Majesty are Ms O’Mara along with Joan Collins and Shirley Bassey, the impression being that anyone can get to speak to the monarch provided you’re pushy enough. But it’s all very casual, so much so that R. doesn’t even see the queen, though she’s distinctive enough, dressed in white and ...”

“... all return after the revolution, when automation has eliminated drudgery and we shall live as Peter Pans in paradise. It’s the totality for ‘kids’ because children already know life without boredom, constraints, separation – some of the time at least, mostly when they’re at play rather than detained in school. ‘There are no limits to ...”

“... saw themselves as armed militants to the Officials’ political compromisers. For them, Michael Collins had said all there was to say about the value of words in the struggle against the Crown when he gave the oration at the funeral of Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike in 1917: ‘That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is ...”

“... whether it’s a work of genius. On the same day, he offers the same tease to Bonham Carter, of Collins Harvill: ‘It is possible that I myself may have a text in England, but it is none too certain, and we had better speak about this orally.’ Again, he claims not to have read it.Publishers can rarely be relied on for their discretion, but why such ...”

“... DROWN?’ ‘I wouldn’t have pulled it if I was you,’ Murdoch told MacKenzie, according to Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie’s deathlessly great history of the Sun, Stick It Up Your Punter! ‘Seemed like a bloody good headline to me.’ So ‘gotcha!’ still probably wins the prize, though there is a groundswell of support for the New York ...”

“... more than a year later thanks, in part, to US pressure orchestrated by her old Harvard friend Peter Galbraith. She later described the period in her memoir, Daughter of the East (1988); it included photo-captions such as: ‘Shortly after President Reagan praised the regime for making “great strides towards democracy”, Zia’s henchmen gunned down ...”

“... fundamental shift in perceptions must be underway. Other commentators were even more outspoken. Peter Jenkins in the Independent described the law as ‘an enemy of justice’. He went on: Plainly, after what has happened, radical changes are required in the whole system of police interrogation and in the law relating to confessions. But not only that, the ...”