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“... political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is not to be found in any particular scandal, nor in the sudden susceptibility of certain individuals to corruption. Contemporary sleaze ...”

“... it requires a long probation to be broken into it.’ Raban’s trip down the Mississippi in a 16-foot open boat (recounted in Old Glory), and his circling of the British Isles in an old fishing ketch (Coasting), produced much more than straight travel narratives: their skilful mixture of social criticism, political analysis, self-exploration and ...”

“... In the simple mechanic movements of address, the foot takes the second position, the other the third, then the body gently falls forward, keeping the head in direct line with the body. The bend is made by a motion at the union of the inferior limbs with the body, and a little flexing at the limbs.’ These instructions for a gentleman’s bow are not too difficult to follow ...”

“... London jury for a libel in a Greek paper whose London circulation was a few hundred copies. Elton John got a million pounds from the Sun, which had suggested he’d had a relationship with a rent boy. The wife of the Yorkshire Ripper was awarded £600,000 for an article, published six years before she issued her writ, which suggested that she had taken money ...”

“... a huge majority, Gollancz started up the Left Book Club. Here were three socialists – Gollancz, John Strachey and Harold Laski – meeting in a restaurant and establishing a publishing venture which would, over ten years, produce and sell six million books, most of them new, and all of them aspiring to a social order where the common interest would ...”

“... and rewarding job. He gravitated gently to Sydney, Australia, where he became a friend of the Rev. John McKnight, a rector in a slum area. Under McKnight’s influence, he moved towards Christian ideas. He liked the way McKnight applied his religion to the real world, and shared the rector’s horror of nuclear weapons. ‘Christians,’ said ...”

“... playing for his university team, working as a coach-instructor at resorts and tennis camps. At six foot three, with unusually long arms and legs and a wiry muscular body, he was transmuted into an intimidating modern player at the age of 14: I was never able to get more than a game or two per set from him after that because the difference between us – I have ...”

“... studio hangs a much smaller, more enigmatic painting called The Sea, Goa. Measuring barely a foot across, it seems at first glance to consist of nothing more than three horizontal stripes of scarlet red and cobalt blue, stacked at the bottom of the panel, in landscape orientation. The horizontal grain of the wood showing in the top half of the ...”

“... the Heseltine campaign for leader in 1990 – Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at dinner parties such as these that ...”

“... that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation – not in the minority and ...”

“... the purpose of a differential diagnosis between the two, let me simplify and call Zico’s left foot in-born, his right foot trained, and compare him to an un-Brazilian left – footed master, Ferenc Puskas, the ‘star of stars’ of the 1954 World Cup. Zico scored all his four goals with his right ...”

“... six-year sojourn in the Llyn peninsula. Their unruliness exceeds definition. The nine and a half foot high Antony and Cleopatra seems luxurious – its square of yellow ochre is fringed with the zigzag borders of an Oriental carpet – but it abandons courtesy in favour of an escalating battle of colour, fought to a climax in its top left corner. With its ...”

“... of pounds’ worth of construction work on order from one of Britain’s top builders, Sunley. John MacArthur, a senior director of Kleinwort Benson, told millions of people watching Channel Four’s Business Programme that the Fayeds’ business empire was worth ‘seven billion dollars’. Now, everyone knows that many of the Fayeds’ claims were ...”

“... he was not a ‘knee-jerk Tory’ (as Murdoch once accurately described Neil’s successor, John Witherow). He had an eye for a good story and was prepared to publish material which annoyed the Government. He engaged in a long war over the serialisation of Peter Wright’s Spycatcher – a battle he eventually won; and although in general he lines up ...”

“... the answer would have been very reassuring. ‘Join Atomic Energy and live a longer life,’ Sir John Hill, chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, said in 1976. Until 1984, even the Government went on claiming there had been no deaths from radiation inside a nuclear power plant. At Windscale, the nuclear plant in Cumbria which caused some local worries ...”