“... of words and things and half-grasped insights – soon after, I had the same experience with Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, chosen because of the Degas on the cover – seems to me the pattern of most readerly initiations. We aren’t drawn in by the argument, or what’s said or shown. Rather something feels right, smells right, in the colour and flavour ...”

“... many recent bad news stories about the NHS, its significance underscored by the fact that David Cameron felt it necessary to present the report to the House of the Commons himself, rather than leave it to the secretary of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the ...”

“... will. Two judicial inquiries were set up by the Labour Government under famous judges, Scarman and Cameron. These reports are of quite different quality from Widgery’s. Painstaking and even-handed, they provided a legal springboard for a bold political initiative on the part of the Government: a declaration that fifty years of a sectarian state founded on ...”

“... Assuming the name Alice Dubois, she was trained by British intelligence and worked under Lord Cameron running a network which provided information about military emplacements and airfields. Eventually caught and sent to Siegburg prison, she led a strike in protest at having to assemble munitions parts, and died in 1918. For a while she was a French ...”

“... if a hospital goes bust somebody takes up the slack. Lansley chose 19 July, the day Rupert and James Murdoch had the media transfixed with their testimony to the Culture Select Committee, to let slip that from next April a billion pounds’ worth of NHS services, including wheelchair services for children and ‘talking therapies’ for people suffering ...”

“... where he lived affected his breathing.Rochdale was also one of the places it’s thought David Cameron had in mind in 2016 when he launched his attack on ‘sink estates’, as if bad architecture, rather than multigenerational deprivation, was the root cause of council estate problems. The Rochdale estates in question were badly in need of ...”

“... because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else. James Lovelock, in his powerful and extremely depressing book The Revenge of Gaia, says this: I am old enough to notice a marked similarity between attitudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most ...”

“... including the Labour Party of Tony Blair and the Conservative Party of Blair’s heir, David Cameron. Glasman has no fundamental problem with Cameron’s notion of the Big Society, which he takes very seriously. He absolutely is not one of those who think it’s just a fluffy cover story for an ideological programme of ...”

“... The contributors fall into three main groups: the poet-critics (Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists ...”

“... bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to save ...”

“... especially the automobile sector, to its knees. In 1985, Reagan’s Treasury secretary, James Baker, negotiated the Plaza Accord, which depreciated the US dollar in relation to the mark, the franc, sterling and the yen. Although Japan acquiesced to the agreement, its government brought in a stimulus to counteract the effect of the accord; the ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack Fairweather ...”

“... history for tourists.A few weeks later, Gordon Brown’s Labour government was voted out. David Cameron’s Conservative-dominated coalition moved rapidly to dismantle Labour’s system of regional planning. In came district-scale housing targets and subsidies for first-time buyers; the idea of flood-related restrictions on Boston housebuilding – which ...”

“... the forces of commerce. Some chieftains became prosperous entrepreneurs – the leader of Clan Cameron developed interests in American land, timber exportation, Caribbean plantations and the Edinburgh money market – while others simply sold up and got out. By the middle of the 19th century, more than two-thirds of Highland estates had been sold to rich ...”

“... on what you consider to be cheating. Writing about literary magazines in the LRB in 1985, Clive James paraphrased an insight of Wittgenstein’s: ‘A game consists of the rules by which it is played.’ I’ve often thought about that remark since I first read it as a graduate student. I’m still not quite sure whether it’s a dazzlingly brilliant ...”