“... used it to demonstrate a completely different ideology from that of the present government. Douglas Hurd, the last effective home secretary, made little attempt to exploit the Home Office for electoral mobilisation. The rot began with Michael Howard, who was resolute in his attempt to make Labour appear ‘soft’ on crime, immigration etc. In their ...”

“... to be men who once worked as juniors in his office, having been hand-picked at a very young age. Douglas Alexander became Brown’s researcher and speechwriter when he was in his early twenties. So did Ed Miliband. Ed Balls joined Brown when he was only 27, after a spell at the Financial Times, and they have been joined at the hip ever since. Despite the ...”

“... beautifully-spoken lawyer who had been a friend of the Kennedys and Defence Secretary to Lyndon Johnson. When Abedi first met him Clifford was looking for a cause – especially if it had a few million dollars attached to it. Adams and Frantz describe in detail one deal in which Clifford and his partner Robert Altman, well-known in Washington social circles ...”

“... tabloids reported in March that the chairman and vice-chairman of Newcastle, Freddie Shepherd and Douglas Hall, had ridiculed fans who paid the extortionate prices for replica shirts (and said that Geordie women were ‘dogs’), six million was wiped off the club’s share value. Peter Johnson spent his first quarter of a ...”

“... ally it had solemnly sworn to defend. ‘If we are driven from the field in Vietnam,’ President Johnson had pledged in July 1965, ‘then no nation can ever have the same confidence in American promises or American protection. We will stand in Vietnam.’ Uncomfortable precedents indeed for America’s allies in a new open-ended crusade against another ...”

“... Reagan was a tough man to convince. He nominated yet another neo-con academic-turned-judge, Douglas Ginsburg, and challenged his antagonists to continue the struggle. But Ginsburg’s past use of marijuana caused a scandal, and Reagan reluctantly called it quits. He returned to the path of pragmatic conservatism with Anthony Kennedy, who passed through ...”

“... lines. The clearest example in the 1979-83 Parliament was the Employment Committee where, as Nevil Johnson points out in the same book, chairman John Golding ‘recognised from the start that it was going to be difficult to hold the committee together and do useful work if its members were constantly caught up in the party political controversy so easily ...”

“... evocation of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an early love, fellow-sailors), his touch in this prose is less secure than in either the kind of prose which he has most practised or the poems which figure within the book as at once asides and nubs. You may say, and believe, that ...”

“... Grub Street of the day, an acre or two of foundling newspapers and inky warrens, inhabited, as Dr Johnson had it, ‘by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems’. Small history has a firm memory of some of these characters, but I doubt if they have ever been rendered so clearly as a group, or so hilariously as a palsied social ...”

“... they did; but heroes from the Iliad and the Aeneid don’t talk like that. Norse poets, unlike Dr Johnson, did not think barnyard vocabulary incompatible with dignity, or that laughter should be kept out of tragedy. O’Donoghue gives an account of these by now well-known myths in four opening chapters running from ‘Creation’ to ‘Apocalypse’. There ...”

“... face. For illustrations of what I mean, study the photographs of the expressions worn by Mr Douglas Hurd at any international conference involving all the Western allies.’ This recalls O’Brien’s statement, delivered just between his sacking from the UN and his writing of Murderous Angels, that ‘as a result of the policy of Macmillan’s ...”

“... 4 in 1978: written by a former Doctor Who script editor, it had to be motivated, on some level, by Douglas Adams’s longing to kill his progenitor. After Baker, the Doctor continued through three more incarnations, before its eventual suspension – the BBC never called it a cancellation – in 1989. And there have been many others: the 1960s movies with ...”

“... there had been ‘nothing like it since Inigo Jones’. The great American modernist Philip Johnson praised its ‘distinction’ in the Architectural Review. Local people disliked it, possibly because, as the Smithsons thought, they were unsophisticated but without doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating meant ...”

“... gentleman. (Hastings was greatly relieved when Utley left to write obituaries for the Times). Paul Johnson, once a rabid socialist and by now an equally rabid Tory, denounced him as ‘a swine and a guttersnipe of the lowest sort’. But the man whose opinion mattered most – perhaps the only man whose opinion mattered at all – was Black. He appears to have ...”

“... confrontation occasionally exposes cant and hypocrisy. In 1964 he offers his services to President Johnson as governor of Samoa (‘My position at this time is in flux enough to allow my serious consideration of such a move’), then withdraws the offer in protest at the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Scolding LBJ (‘start acting like a thinking human ...”