“... need to be there. Forty per cent of them are waiting for a care plan – either in their own home or at a residential home – and another 24 per cent intermediary care. Social care budgets, outsourced and administered through local authorities, collapsed during George Osborne’s austerity decade. In October, the ...”

“... which she assumes it would be. Every night when she says her prayers, she begins by saying: ‘Lord, I can never thank you enough for the parents you gave me.’ She was an only child, and her parents were devoted to her. When her father first saw her in the hospital nursery ‘the other babies,’ he always claimed, ‘were just lying still, but I was ...”

“... safe (to protect it from the eyes of ‘all and sundry’); there is no doubt that successive home secretaries, including Labour’s Frank Soskice and the Conservatives’ Reginald Maudling, also sought to prevent the story coming out or – as Scott became more vocal – being given credence. Bloch also charts the conversations – going back to 1968 ...”

“... disastrous War on Drugs into blackly comic fiction. He is best known for a series set in his home town of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, heartland of Mexico’s most powerful cartel. Silver Bullets, the first instalment, came out in Spanish in 2008, followed by La prueba del ácido (The Acid Test) in 2010, Nombre de perro (A Dog’s Name) in ...”

“... here … this is definitely not about the fucking fish.’ Baxter doesn’t want the ship to come home: he’s planning to get out of the whaling business, and looking for a hefty insurance payout. ‘We killed them all, Arthur,’ he says. ‘It was tremendous while it lasted and magnificently profitable too. We had 25 fucking good years.’ But there ...”

“... or matter-of-factness into their ceremonies. The invitation to the recent memorial service of Lord McAlpine included the brisk line, ‘We have taken a large church’ – meaning St Paul’s. On the other hand, the real aristocracy very often still have the worst of it, as the late Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, wrote in her wonderfully candid ...”

“... the fact that the rest of them are canards did not prevent them from growing into chickens coming home to roost or even, in one or two cases, fully-fledged albatrosses. If Churchill was the victim of the first – a composite lie assiduously put about by the Labour Party – he was the perpetrator of the second. Numbers 3 and 4 originated in a mixture of ...”

“... sense, but the response to a crisis which is either close to death or mimics it. Death itself, Lord Yama, repeatedly fails to keep dates, even when Jasmine has arranged her wedding to him, in the form of sati. Jasmine’s several incarnations are more than a device. They exemplify the main power a passive character has: to become someone other and stop the ...”

“... refused to help a politically incorrect body. The corpse started a long and halting journey back home, got stuck at endless African airports, began to decompose. Eventually, Barnum got it disguised as a Taiwanese spare part, smuggled it across the Zimbabwe border and the great Soweto funeral show could go ahead at last. Various factions disagreed over which ...”

“... the Master that blindness barred him from most sports, the question was determinedly pressed home: ‘What games do you play? Cricket, Rugby, Tennis?’ Such tenacity, such singlemindedness. And it was much the same with other dons he met. A philosophy tutor gave him the titles of five hefty-sounding volumes and told him to read them by the following ...”

“... the times of Francis I and through the château and the brothel before it was transferred to the home. Yet the author has surprisingly little to say about spas or eaux minérales. He is informative, however, on washbasins, fountains and washhouses. On the first, he reminds us that the French word for washbasin, lavabo, is borrowed from the language of ...”

“... her mother, but not until well into adult life. I feel that with R.B. Haldane, the philosophical Lord Haldane of Cloan, as brother-in-law I, too, would have swung to Conservatism. There was too much philosophy, too much ethical responsibility, too much intellect about. Does Benton realise the vast certainties of the Haldane stance? Naomi jumped into marriage ...”

“... language has its way with him. A lot turns on how he reacts to this condition, once it is brought home to him. Graham’s attitude is light years away from those who, having discovered duplicities in language, are determined to root them out; or those others who, having discovered the duplicitousness, delightedly aggravate it. The better alternative, Graham ...”

“... yet had capital to spare to lend to foreign governments, build railroads and other public works at home and abroad, and lastly, and very reluctantly, supply long-term finance to British manufacturing industry. On this last point, Kynaston shows much better and more concisely than all the vast ‘decline of Britain’ literature why the City and the men from ...”

“... original if somewhat amateurish begetter of methodical inquiry into the membership of Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons ...”