“... recent Cabinet Ministers, only Ernest Bevin (two vols down, one to go) and Nye Bevan (canonised by Michael Foot) have received extended treatment, while the massive life of Churchill is unique in its Victorian dimensions. Today, the best way for a politician to guarantee this much-coveted form of life after death is to write it himself. And if he entertains ...”

“... Hurd, Fowler, Chalker and Ridley were produced – all divorced. Palmerston, Asquith and Lloyd George were cited as testimony to the morality of previous days and ages. Many were the cautions against hypocrisy. Mr Parkinson finally resigned on the morning of Friday, 15 October, at more or less the hour that copies of the last edition of the Times, complete ...”

“... and – if you were female, or an ambivalent male – darkly unsafe. ‘He was lovable,’ Michael Young said, ‘because he did not mind whether he was loved or not.’ Of course, this was artifice: he craved popularity and acclaim as much as any performer; but he was also capable of standing back and appreciating the wider picture. If clever people ...”

“... Premier has shown himself to be Lakshmi Mittal’s Premier, Bernie Ecclestone’s Premier, George W. Bush’s pet puff-adder – the hireling, in short, of anyone with power or ready cash. While this glad-handing was politically motivated, we now also know that the Blairs are not above schmoozing with conmen for real-estate discounts. The old adage has ...”

“... old friend Homer’. The verdicts that these massive works provoked were often scorching. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Gladstone’s successor as chancellor of the exchequer and a formidable classical scholar, said that he was ‘fundamentally wrong’ about Homer. Tennyson thought his opinions on Homeric religion ‘hobbyhorsical’. Huxley denounced ...”

“... the mysteries of the everyday. When Jennings assembled a collection of M-O ‘day reports’ on George VI’s coronation, published under the title May the Twelfth, he was sure it marked the beginning of an entirely new form of literature. He thought of the methods of Mass-Observation less as sociology than as a kind of poetry, one which, in Roland ...”

“... hear that the line ‘Free me, Lord, from evil folk’ (140) is best spoken in the voice of George Bush. Inversion, the possessive, the unpronounceable and an unfortunate word-choice all converge in Psalm 18, where he transforms a dull line in the King James (‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto ...”

“... economic experiments suggested by eminent thinkers of Africa and the Caribbean, from C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Eric Williams of Trinidad, to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Michael Manley of Jamaica. The New International Economic Order (NIEO) called for and the 1974 charter of economic rights ...”

“... his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and clumsy handling of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (which would have allowed ...”

“... America started arriving at Fort Gulick in Panama for training in counterinsurgency. According to Michael McClintock’s scrupulously documented Instruments of Statecraft (1992), over the next two decades 45,000 Latin Americans, including the future leaders of various coups and juntas, graduated from Fort Gulick. The US army also sent mobile training teams to ...”

“... Blairite vision of popular culture. Where the previous hosts had been drunkenly offensive, Michael Wojas was defensive – a much worse thing in a barman. He was off his face and paranoid, which eventually led to the club closing down. To be fair, the smoking ban and a change in the drinking laws prepared the way, but the Colony was enamoured of past ...”

“... just the sort of ‘bridge-builder’ a new field needs. In 1973, Dyos and the literary scholar Michael Wolff brought out The Victorian City, a copiously illustrated two-volume compilation of essays on everything from railway termini to pubs, slums to suburbs and poets to prostitutes. The defining publication of this infant field, it is the model for this ...”

“... art: they called themselves ‘The Ancients’, among whom the most gifted, besides Palmer, were George Richmond and Edward Calvert. Shoreham for the Ancients functioned as, in Henry James’s phrase, ‘the Great Good Place’ – ‘a valley so hidden,’ Calvert said, ‘that it looked as if the devil had not yet found it out.’ The Shoreham spirit that ...”

“... got out. Because Disraeli was a bona fide imperialist – a believer, like many of those around George Bush, in the principle of Imperium et Libertas – he could demonstrate that he had no goal other than that of freeing the hostages and punishing their captors only by sacking the place where they had been held. The ‘higher principles of humanity’ he ...”

“... of letters, having paid close attention to the published correspondence of Balzac, Flaubert and George Sand, and alert to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years ...”