“... the first thing about the country they had come to. They did not know, moreover, that after the Heath Government had allowed Leila Khaled, the 24-year-old Arab girl who tried to hijack a plane over Britain, to go home, and were internationally condemned for their weakness, there were to be no more safe passages for political terrorists. British policy and ...”

“... that has nothing whatever to do with this book.Although it appears in a series (edited by Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe himself) in which the titles suggest all the latest Marxist, Feminist and Structuralist Paris fashions, the actual contents of this exercise, where they are comprehensible, seem to me to be distinctly old hat. Most of the essays are ...”

“... 1st earl of Iveagh, purchased Kenwood House, a neoclassical villa on the edge of Hampstead Heath and one of the finest surviving examples of the mature designs of Robert Adam. Two years later, Lord Iveagh died, bequeathing Kenwood to the nation, along with 63 Old Master and 18th-century British paintings from his own collection, including works by ...”

“... indulge in orgies of this: ‘We consigned to the flames or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges.’ This impatience with literary artefacts means that he and ...”

“... Association at Birmingham’s Grand Hotel on 19 October 1974, the Conservatives, under Ted Heath, had just lost a general election and Joseph had emerged as the likeliest alternative leader. However, in a speech which deliberately departed from economic issues to denounce the permissive society, Joseph undermined his political credentials. He warned ...”

“... repose of the eye, a late 16th or early 17th-century garden might contain what Bacon called a ‘heath or wilderness’. This would be a carefully informalised (though still very formal) area in which rigid symmetry would relax into the appearance of something more like unregimented nature. The aim throughout the early modern garden was to bombard all the ...”

“... times. Its promoter, a renegade Cambridge mathematician, tried firing noisy bombs over Hampstead Heath to test the method and attract investors. Satirists from Swift to Eco have found much matter in these schemes. But in more ponderous mood, such witty vexations form little part of the resolutely Anglocentric ‘true story’ recounted by Dava ...”

“... Gates, near Birmingham, during the miners’ strike of 1974, widely credited with destroying the Heath Government. Mass picketing by miners at Saltley, supported on the crucial day of closure by several thousand demonstrators from Birmingham, succeeded in closing the gates of an important coke depot. Scargill has given a vivid account of that day in later ...”

“... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...”

“... resurrected for some time to come. Coincident with the end of socialism in any meaningful sense, John Gray tells us that ‘a liberal political philosophy is an impossibility,’ and Ted Honderich announces that Conservatism is a nullity. If both of them are right and can be taken at face value, there does not seem to be much left. Dr Gray’s original ...”

“... artist Jean Tinguely exposed his Homage to New York. The exhibit consisted of a vast Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg device, fashioned from old bike parts, player-pianos, fans, balloons and other detritus. In the presence of Governor Nelson Rockefeller and many other big bananas, Tinguely threw a switch and set the heap on course to ...”

“... Peckham stands with hand on hip; he was to die after breaking his neck while hunting. Nicholas Heath sits with his arm over the back of his chair; he changed his name to Nicholas Nicholas when he inherited an estate, Boy Court. Mrs Wilmot, painted in riding clothes in the same year, leans forward on a rail, whip in hand. She shares the picture with a ...”

“... McEwan, I tried to call you on the radio telephone, when our old flatmate, John Webb, fell overboard in a gale off the coast of Long Island a few years ago and was nearly swept south to Bermuda. But the old Oxford number had been disconnected, and your publisher told me that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls ...”

“... Denis Thatcher is entirely inventable – as John Wells understood: he comes in a flat pack with easy-to-follow instructions, all the components familiar general shapes, all parts from stock, no odd angles, no imagination required. When they came up with the idea for Ikea, they used Denis Thatcher as the prototype ...”

“... tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to release him, invoking the provisions of Magna Carta against imprisonment without trial. The Great Oliver then committed Maynard to the Tower, summoned the judges and told them ...”