“... was that it would end up as an oligopoly.’ Souter even criticises right-wing Tories like Ridley, Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo for complaining about his oligopoly. Wolmar dutifully describes this argument as ‘sophisticated’. It does, however, seem a little churlish of Souter to criticise Tory ministers when they handed so many public assets to him on ...”

“... their majority in the Senate and might even increase it if Raphael Warnock prevails over Herschel Walker, a Republican former football star, in the Georgia run-off on 6 December. (That Walker is regarded as a plausible candidate is one of the strange fruits of the Trump era.) The Senate majority will be indispensable to ...”

“... be construed as the man who tipped off Burgess and Maclean for their getaway on 25 May 1951? Peter Wright, of course, is convinced that he was Roger Hollis, Deputy Director-General and then Director-General of British counter-intelligence. But he, too, loses himself in the wilderness of mirrors, and Spycatcher for me does not prove the case. Mr ...”

“... story was strangely precarious. Although his Two Treatises were published in 1689, they were, as Peter Laslett showed in the 1950s, largely written before it, in the context of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681. In the wake of the largely imaginary fears aroused by the Popish Plot of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully ...”

“... A Confederacy of Dunces was eight times rejected. But after 11 years Mrs Toole, with the help of Walker Percy, induced Louisiana State University Press to accept it. Against all the odds, the novel became a best-seller, and won its author a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1980. Reportedly, Toole’s literary remains comprised a carbon of the rejected A ...”

“... legend of rave concerns the ‘Ibiza Four’: the DJs Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club Amnesia, and watched DJ Alfredo play an unusually eclectic mix of pop, new wave, disco and US house as the sun came up. They came back to London and ...”

“... himself as a ‘legstretcher’; he also styled himself a ‘Propatetique’, in other words ‘a walker forward on feete’ (as opposed to a ‘peripatetic’ who merely walks around). Both these reputations, the comic and the adventurer, were diligently cultivated by Coryate – he was a great self-publicist – and both are expressed in his best-known ...”

“... scuttles away, rucksack on stooped shoulders, distancing himself from his earlier disguise as wall-walker, acrobat; a workaday man of the crowd. But even with the rucksack – wrong colour, wrong shape – the man stands out: too furtive, too fiercely concentrated, fleeing the scene rather than jogging or striding like the fortunate denizens of the ...”

“... detail. How much could a person expect to be paid for the upkeep of a marsupial in 1611? William Walker, keeper of fowl at the menagerie in St James’s Park, was paid five shillings a month to care for England’s first recorded opossum. What was the customs duty on an emu in 1801? Joseph Banks narrowly avoided customs duty ad valorem – duty based on ...”

“... olive year, it’s as rare as snake-oil. But the host takes a hint and digs out a bottle of Johnny Walker refilled with a deep green liquid. ‘Gold,’ he says. Rosenblum can’t wait to try it but has to catch a plane. At the airport he is delayed by suspicious Israelis and searched. As he hurries to the departure lounge, the bottle falls out and smashes on ...”

“... chance of putting something back into the community.’ Among those who were rejoicing was Graham Walker, a senior partner at Arthur Andersen who had been appointed to the New Labour ‘task force’ for ‘reducing the bureaucratic burden on teachers’. One novel way of reducing bureaucratic burdens was to add to that burden by imposing a government task ...”

“... Heaven’). He performed for the neighbourhood children:He played nursery rhymes, ‘Little Sally Walker’, ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, ‘Humpty Dumpty’, ‘Jack and Jill’ and ‘She’ll Be Coming around the Mountain’. He told the story of Chicken Little, about how the sky is falling … He kept us entertained making sounds of the train whistle ...”

“... how far should they allow their informers to go in order to protect their secret role? Patrick Walker, the senior MI5 officer in Northern Ireland (later appointed head of the agency) drew up a report in 1980 instructing the RUC to place spying ahead of solving crimes. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which hears cases brought against the security and ...”

“... It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social democracy, the conversation must have rattled along. (Goldsmith, says ...”

“... two children by Wisdom; her remarriage to Gottfried Lessing and subsequent escape with their son, Peter, to England with the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing in her suitcase; and so on. But Klein is too baffled by Lessing and the choices she made, and usually too disapproving of them, to probe the connection between the life and the work. This is ...”