“... converted a barge into a makeshift rig, the Sea Gem, which in November 1965 discovered the West Sole gas field off the Norfolk coast. Six days later the Sea Gem capsized with the loss of 13 lives. The search for hydrocarbons in the North Sea led the oil companies into the deepest water and toughest conditions they had ever encountered. In 1964 it was ...”

“... about democracy versus dictatorship, or race, or religion – Shia v. Sunni, for example, or the West v. the East. In our own day this separating-out has even come to colour the Brexit debate. Brexiteers see trade wars as risk-free enterprises which are not prone to slide into actual fighting. President Trump has told us that ‘trade wars are good and easy ...”

“... did not have a telephone. She drank quite a bit, and was sectioned more than once, but her former West Indian neighbours insist that most of the time they all got on perfectly well together. Drucilla sometimes babysat their children, and they sent flowers to her funeral. Powell was proud of the way he had continued to protect the identity of his ...”

“... action as a Liberal Parliamentary candidate after the war. He failed to win Kincardine and West Aberdeenshire by only 642 votes, and in 1951 went back to Scotland to fight another seat in the same interest. From a man who has spent a fair proportion of his columnar life deriding liberals if not Liberals, one would have liked more explanation than he ...”

“... several months we continued to meet and (while I was doing a ridiculous job of teaching in the West Country before ‘going up’ to Oxford) to correspond. By the time I was ready to attend my first freshers’ fair, I knew enough to join the Labour Club as a candidate member of The Group – an open conspiracy which scorned to conceal its aims, objects ...”

“... artists (Bell, Cohen, Knight) or authors (Allingham, Blyton, Compton-Burnett, Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English ...”

“... to fellow citizens. There is no comparison between Pavlik Morozov and Clive Ponting. Nor is a Sir Nigel, trundling up on the 8.40 from Oxford to testify to a Royal Commission (if there were still Royal Commissions), about to indulge in anything that can seriously be called ‘denunciation’. If the difference between Moscow in the Thirties and London in the ...”

“... European elections, the voters of this overseas micro-state were in 2004 absorbed into the South-West England regional Euro-constituency. The recent success of Gibraltar’s service sector, which has ‘passporting’ rights through the UK’s membership of the EU to sell financial services to the rest of Europe, has been a boon both to locals and to ten ...”

“... suffering’). She believes that the faith expressed in arch-Brexiteers like Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage is driven by a generalised and deep-seated xenophobia: ‘It’s always easy to blame Johnny Foreigner.’ A local trade union leader agreed, arguing that the promise of Leave was sold to the people of Dover ‘on one subject and one subject ...”

“... formal study, Hamilton entered the Slade, where he met two future IG cronies, Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson. He was especially fond of Henderson, whom he found ‘well educated, quick-witted and streetwise, on friendly terms with just about everyone worth knowing in the art world of London, and blessed with a generosity of spirit that he showed by ...”

“... populist tsunami in Poland has definitely slowed down.’ The same metaphor – coined in 2016 by Nigel Farage, for whom the conventional image of the ‘wave’ was apparently insufficient – informs Kuisz’s explanation of PiS’s rise to power in 2015: pent-up grievances about increasing inequality and what Kuisz coyly calls fears of ‘cultural ...”

“... and homophobic posts on social media. His background is stolidly upper-middle-class: childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George ...”

“... Street. She had over-promoted him to be foreign secretary and then, following the resignation of Nigel Lawson, quickly moved him to be chancellor, where he was more at home. Her hatred of Heseltine, who was the very last person she wanted to succeed her, had three primary causes. She was still hurt by his open treachery during the Westland affair in ...”

“... says in Johnny English Reborn, because ‘Simon went to Eton’ – a nice joke since Dominic West, the actor playing Simon, also went to Eton.) Suddenly we were back in the 1960s, when the Conservative Party, looking around for a successor to the old Etonian Harold Macmillan, chose between two other Etonians, Lord Hailsham and Alec Douglas-Home. How had ...”

“... then I was helped by some of the actors in my first play, Forty Years On, which was running in the West End. One of the actors was George Fenton, who is doing the music for the film, and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.15 January. The police officer who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot ...”