“... 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 ...”

“... sanitised. Christopher Hassall was asked to write the authorised biography in part because, as Nigel Jones notes in his own biography of Brooke, Hassall’s lengthy Life of Eddie Marsh had managed ‘to avoid the topic of his subject’s homosexuality’ and he could therefore be relied on to be discreet. (It’s unfair to say that Hassall doesn’t tell ...”

“... does not seek to bring society under total state control. Some far-right populists, such as Nigel Farage, even claim to be libertarians. For the most part, far-right populism doesn’t share the expansionist territorial aims of interwar fascism, Trump’s sabre-rattling at Canada and Greenland notwithstanding; indeed, if anything links far-right ...”

“... not themselves properly belong to the people. In his speech the morning after the EU referendum, Nigel Farage claimed it as a ‘victory for real people’. Evidently the 48 per cent who wanted to stay in the EU were not quite real: they might not be part of the authentic British (or, more likely so far as Farage is concerned, English) people at all. Trump ...”

“... who is 72, has joined Ukip. He’s voted Labour, Conservative and Ukip in the past, but it will be Nigel Farage’s party for him this time. For Hardie, it’s not about immigration – there aren’t many immigrants in Grimsby – but about the European Union, and a lingering bitterness over the end of the old fishing days, and a sense that Labour has ...”

“... the late 1950s London was experiencing a housing boom, not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her ...”

“... remains oddly unabashed, convinced that it was a glorious victory – but then Mrs Thatcher and Nigel Lawson believe they have done great things for the British economy, so he is hardly the only public figure to suffer such delusions. MacGregor’s memoirs are persuasive in one crucial respect. They lend no support at all to the idea that the NUM was ‘set ...”

“... accept the wages they were willing to pay. What they did was set up a recruiting drive in the West Indies, encouraging first thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of immigrants to come over here. The social and political consequences changed not only the bus crews but the country tout entier. ‘Iain, I’ve got the worst job of all for ...”

“... to herself as ‘head of state’ and talking of ‘I, as a government’. Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson may have fulminated against her, in the course of reviewing this book, but they helped launch the good ship Thatcher and sailed in her fatly for many a year, long sustaining and defending her against those who objected from the outset to government ...”

“... against real subversion, IRA bombs or Islamic extremists plotting biological death against the West. This is the problem which lies at the root of Britain’s form of secrecy. If we had not been so hostile to secrecy, the fact of it would not have had to be kept as secret as it was. The liberal prejudice against secrecy originated in the 19th ...”

“... union duties. Communism had enjoyed currency for some time among Scots miners. For many years West Fife, the largest coalfield in Scotland – all of it now closed – was represented by the Communist MP, Willie Gallagher. I remember walking with McGahey and the print union leader, Bill Keys, through the centre of Birmingham to one of the last big rallies ...”

“... madonna of bother, into everlasting power.Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992 The picture which Nigel Lawson draws of Thatcher herself is a remarkable testimony to the manner in which her government’s grand strategy was determined. Increasingly, ideas were translated into policy via will, whim and pique. The advice of responsible ministers was superseded ...”

“... posed in front of a provincial isolation hospital: period domesticity verging on John Wyndham or Nigel Kneale. Conventional pieties. The dress, the white shirt and ironed tie, the pipe. Such serenity summons up, for a generation queasy with paranoia, biological experiments, government-funded research, something nasty behind metal-frame ...”

“... in climate change because they were freezing cold this winter and trust what Donald Trump or Nigel Farage tells them on Fox News or the BBC. I mean the people who stand to gain from the Trump administration’s America First Energy Plan, which will increase US dependence on fossil fuels: more fracking, more coal-mining, more pipelines. There’s nothing ...”