“... on the campaign-strategy and policy-planning groups and has also effectively resumed the job he held under Neil Kinnock as Communications Director, though his centre of operations has now moved to the Party’s new media headquarters at Millbank – ‘my Millbank’, as he likes to call it. It has become a Westminster cliché, echoed privately by the ...”

“... no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a ...”

“... be accepted at the outset. Anyone – to be more specific, mountebanks like Daniel Goldhagen and David Cesarani – with not a lot to say, but with a will to dilate about atrocity, can extort a hearing for themselves. Others, with more to say, seem to have a clause in their contracts demanding that they mention it at least once in any article, be it on ...”

“... of twice-told Beat tales, refers to Ginsberg’s historic undergraduate illumination as ‘hand-held’ – perhaps an allusion to a key detail in what he had said to me: the fact that an act of masturbation had triggered Blake’s phantasmal arrival in his East Harlem tenement flat. This account of the revelatory plunge into Godhead (‘the ceremony of his ...”

“... Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a ...”

“... internally united entity, the Great Isle is finished, and ready to recede back into the shape it held at roughly the mid-term of its broken past. He also makes it seem incomprehensible that the divided bits of the former Britain – and England above all – should imagine they either have, or need to lust after, a future separated from the Continent, all in ...”

“... France. (After the war, France took Syria and Lebanon. Palestine and Mosul went to Britain. Turkey held Diyarbekir and Cilicia.) An unnamed India Office official said that, until twenty years before, Mosul vilayet had been attached to the districts of Basra and Baghdad, both claimed by Britain. According to the minutes, ‘M. Picot replied that it was ...”

“... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...”

“... out? Look at the summer of 1982 more closely. A handful of poorly armed Palestinians and Lebanese held off a very large Israeli army, air force and navy from 5 June till the middle of August. This was a major political achievement for the Palestinians. Something else was at stake in the invasion, however, to judge by its results a year and a half later ...”

“... man has revealed the hidden depths, the ugly unmastered history, of the country he claims to lead. David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Klan and a former Louisiana state representative, whose endorsement Trump could barely bring himself to disavow, said that Unite the Right was intended to ‘fulfil the promises of Donald Trump’. When Fields set off ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...”

“... are given. If he hadn’t lost his seat the time before last, might his finger in the dike have held back the flood of arrogance, disunity and sleaze by which Major was overwhelmed?21 October 1997. Coopers & Lybrand dinner for selected corporate clients at the Lanesborough Hotel. I am placed next to Ed Straw, Jack’s brother, whom I immediately take to. He ...”

“... For as long as anyone can remember much of this land has been hidden behind tall fences. Walkers held their breath and made a wide circuit. Terrible ghosts were trapped in the ground. On the west of the peninsula, now captured by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, was once the Execution Dock. The gallows and iron cage moved here from Wapping, when the ...”

“... extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue Velvet) and that she resented Andy Warhol for making millions by turning her face into a silk screen image. What the book doesn’t do is discuss Taylor’s film performances in any depth. This ...”