“... it won in 1997 in what most assumed were freak victories. Of Labour’s 30 most marginal seats it held 23 with increased majorities. The Tories won only four Labour marginals with decisive swings, and two of those, Romford and Upminster, are idiosyncratic. Those conspicuous beneficiaries of Thatcherism, Reading and Swindon, swung further to Labour – in ...”

“... absurdities, its partings and comings together, its superstructure of sexual theory, is very well held, and although we’re asked to see the story rather more from the wife’s point of view than the husband’s, Maddox won’t give her the benefit of outraged or sentimental feminism; she even dares to speak of ‘Frieda’s tedious insistence that she was ...”

“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”

“... is a daunting enterprise. For one thing, Dr Johnson apart, no English man of letters has ever held a higher opinion of the dignity of biography as a literary form, or inferentially expected more from its practitioners. Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies,’ may have been meant only metaphorically, but ...”

“... sacrifice his life to the national cause, and that was the measure of his worth. Norwid, however, held that it was a violation of natural rights to relate the meaning of human life to armed struggle and to nothing else. He mocked the ‘forlorn hope’ gestures, the over-dramatised martyrology. In all this he saw an anti-intellectualism, a contempt for ...”

“... ruthless towards former lovers. This cannot be quite right: people as cold and hard as Sharp is held to have been do not destroy themselves in alcoholic depression and self-loathing. That kind of behaviour is surely evidence more of emotional turmoil. The world of Edwardian leftish journalism inhabited by Sharp was dominated by two opposed currents. A ...”

“... replaced the wisdom of the ancestors. ‘Till about the yeare 1649,’ Aubrey wrote, it was ‘held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation in learning; and not to be good manners to be more knowing than his neighbours and forefathers.’ As the Christian narrative of the Fall gave way to a sense of history as progress and steady ...”

“... eight million. It operated two administrative capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. It held Fallujah and for a time Ramadi, sixty miles from Baghdad, as well as innumerable small towns and villages, much desert and a good deal of irrigated countryside. The horrors of IS rule are well known: the killings of Shia; the choice offered to the Christians ...”

“... for retirement in an orderly way’. The PEP in question was General Augusto Pinochet, who held between $6 and $8 million in offshore accounts established by Riggs, and is now being investigated for fraud and embezzlement. Jersey became an offshore finance centre as a result of pressure from local law firms, some with strong political connections, and ...”

“... has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union. A similar call has come from David Melding, the Conservative deputy presiding officer of the Welsh Assembly, in The Reformed Union: The UK as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind and members of the so-called Democracy ...”

“... that he sometimes seemed to be cheering on the defeat of the British army in South Africa. He held an anti-war meeting in Birmingham Town Hall, the heartland of Chamberlain’s political fief, and insisted that it go ahead when everyone from the chief constable down pleaded with him to cancel it. The result was the virtual sack of the town hall by a Union ...”

“... Craig has been signed up for the American remake of the first film, which will be directed by David Fincher. The quest to find Lisbeth Salander took on Scarlett O’Hara proportions; the role has been filled with attendant fanfare by Rooney Mara, who was introduced to the world in Fincher’s last movie, The Social Network. (It will be interesting to see ...”

“... was keeping an eye on a crypto-Fascist, anti-semitic organisation known as the Right Club. It held its meetings above a South Kensington restaurant called the Russian Tea Rooms. Among its luminaries was Anna Wolkoff, daughter of the restaurant’s expatriate proprietors. She and her co-members were pledged to obstruct the war effort. Among other ...”

“... people whose accents and bearing remind him of the place he knows best. When he was still being held in relatively civilised conditions in Pakistan at the start of his captivity, when he still imagined an imminent release, he was relieved to see two MI5 agents, a man and a woman, simply because they were British, until he realised they weren’t going to ...”

“... painted glass. Iconoclasm fights idolatry, but reform meets resistance from traditional custom, held dear by the commons – the same ‘very simple and unlearned people’ whose souls Cranmer would save from ‘beads, pardons, pilgrimages and such other like popery’, but who crave earthly sustenance, protection and fairness.The story begins with ...”