“... Brown, accounts of which made me thankful there are no firearms stored (within easy reach) at Downing Street. Duels are now fought with shouting matches, spin doctors and snide public allusions to ‘the bloke next door’. The toxic mix of power, ambition and exhaustion is a recipe for rivalries: Churchill and Chamberlain, Morrison and Bevan, Heath and ...”

“... chancellor of the exchequer. His wife is away in the country much of the time; he wanders about 11 Downing Street in his carpet slippers. He looks at you a lot, and brushes up against you in the hallway when he passes. You know he has a terrible reputation but if you are honest with yourself you have to admit you quite fancy him. The tension in the house ...”

“... the park, where he is walking his dog, and recent events in the news: Blair’s departure from Downing Street and his journey to his Sedgefield constituency, shedding the trappings of power all the while; the car-bomb attacks on the West End of London and Glasgow airport and have-a-go hero John Smeaton’s assault on one ...”

“... he negotiated a contract with Bernard Lintot (who was hoping to buy himself a poet who could rival John Dryden in merit and popularity) for a translation of Homer. This was probably the best deal ever struck by an English poet. The fee for the copyright combined with income from the sale of subscription copies of the Iliad made Pope around £5000. That was an ...”

“... moment of his election to Parliament to the eventual achievement of his goal. One wonders whether John Major ever heard a similar message click-clacking from railway carriage wheels in the course of his extraordinary non-stop journey up the same greasy pole. There was scarcely time for him to form expectations during the interval that ran from his original ...”

“... port, Chilean wine and so forth. One of the number could never get enough of the joke. This was John Braine, whose special party-trick was the skipping of ironic bits. When he said that England these days was run by the trade unions and the pansies, he meant it. When he went on about treason and the intellectuals there was grim, literal relish in his ...”

“... system and usher in an era of multi-party democracy. Mrs Thatcher had been eighteen months in Downing Street, and Michael Foot had become the Labour leader three months before. Britain was being pulled apart by ideology and extremism. We would draw into politics people of talent and good will – the ‘political virgins’ – who were alienated by the ...”

“... office. The Conservatives were returned for four more years. By the time Harold Wilson was back in Downing Street again, in 1974, he was sadder, more realistic, more conventional. The cheeky humour with which he denounced the ‘faded antimacassars’ who ruled British society had turned into deference. He was no longer the campaigner with a single sheet of ...”

“... George Wigg, a Labour MP, told MI5 all he could find out about what was going on in 10 Downing Street. MI5 had a fink in Transport House. Someone on the staff of the Daily Herald, a Labour newspaper, is thought to have reported regularly to his CIA contact. There were other ways of obtaining information about Wilson and his colleagues. His home and ...”

“... thought of Karl as their Nachwuchs – the next young poet. But he went south to Cambridge, to Downing College and the throne of F.R. Leavis, and became eventually and primarily a critic and editor. There was an opinion that Leavis had strangled a promising nightingale. Certainly Karl’s first important critical essay (‘Notes on Agreement and ...”

“... just such a helmet looking as if he might be coming off duty from the foot of the Cross.25 July. John Schlesinger dies. The obituaries are more measured than he would have liked, the many undistinguished films he made later in life set against A Kind of Loving and Sunday, Bloody Sunday. He wasn’t by nature a journeyman film-maker taking whatever came ...”

“... intermittently filled this kind of slot, beginning in 1947, when they commissioned the Labour MP John Parker and the Conservative MP Quintin Hogg, now Lord Hailsham, to produce books of a couple of hundred pages each. ‘When the manuscripts were received,’ the publishers were forced to reveal, ‘it was found that while Mr Parker had kept closely to the ...”

“... them written off: ‘Loathsome, oily Leon Brittan’, ‘the odious Heseltine’, ‘that prick John Patten . . . so ambitious that he squeaks when he walks’, ‘that lazy, greasy slob John Hunt’, ‘that toad John Major . . . who has always loathed me’ and so on. Only the ...”

“... from the rest of the world. This can go too far. Some of her narration has a stunned, Janet-and-John quality. But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back towards New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to Carol’s house for a while, and Therese said to ...”

“... a wake. But a couple of lunatic optimists turned up with splendid bottles, and by midnight we were downing them in astonishment and relief. Labour hadn’t simply won: it dealt the conservative side the biggest defeat in its history. The Canberra tallyroom show was a quasi-presidential two-horse race; we loved it because our own mount came in, heavily ...”