“... much of his capital was fictitious) was greeted like a monarch. The fantasist from the Antiguan St John’s was not in a mood for compromise and proceeded to describe the test cricket played in St John’s Wood as ‘boring’. The future, as far as he was concerned, lay with ‘Twenty20’, the shortest version of the ...”

“... Romania, for example. The problems were forcefully pointed out by the troops on the ground when John Major went to visit them in Kuwait after the war. He said that Options for Change would not be implemented until the lessons of the war had been analysed. However, Tom King, then the Secretary of State for Defence, had already promised to give the ...”

“... of Conservative dominance in British politics that runs from Lord Salisbury to the Thatcher/Major era was more precisely the Conservative and Unionist century. The Liberals split over Irish Home Rule in 1886, and the Liberal Unionists made a formal alliance with the Conservatives in 1895, amalgamating as the Conservative and Unionist Party in 1912 ...”

“... didn’t answer my other questions didn’t make me doubt for one minute he could read my mind. John Gavin who played Sam in Psycho was Reagan’s ambassador to Mexico. Psycho was the first Hollywood film to show a toilet flush. Encopresis is another mental illness I suffered from. It involves farting. The initials of the history student, now a ...”

“... Foucault, closely followed, as we shall see, by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The heroes are – well, Derrida, of course, but above all Noam Chomsky, here exalted especially because of his sturdily rationalist opposition to Foucault, in an exchange on Dutch Television in the early Seventies about the location of political ...”

“... circumstances even impressive, the mere desire to have seems to many today – just as it did to John Locke – a furtive, even incipiently criminal form of lust. Disputes over property, and over the power which flows from it and flows back into it, are far from being the only major theme (let alone the motor) of human ...”

“... week I happened to hear a person say, apropos of Private Eye’s feature, ‘The Secret Diary of John Major aged 47¾’, ‘he looks like an Adrian’ (making the link with Adrian Mole). I thought – Professor Barton made me think – ‘Cratylus, thou art mighty ...”

“... stop a capillary movement in the same direction. These communities have decided to live apart. The major surgery of redrawn frontiers and expulsions was averted, but nothing could arrest a micro-surgery of mutual aversion, ‘peace walls’ and patchwork division. The consequences have been outlined and commented on in another admirable analysis which appeared ...”

“... by the US health insurance provider Kaiser Permanente in 1953. President Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explained to his boss the basic concept before the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 Jeremy Hunt, then health minister, admitted at a Commons Health Committee hearing that Kaiser ...”

“... the way in which historians have developed the interpretation advanced by Colley’s mentor, Sir John Plumb, in his now classic The Growth of Political Stability. Plumb’s book, which brilliantly delineated the change from the political chaos of the 17th to the political order of the 18th century, was such a tour de force that ever since most historians ...”

“... the hardshell godmother of punk was without honour in her own country. She simply wasn’t there. John Lydon (formerly Rotten) was up on the hoardings, three layers back, advertising butter. Thatcher was a historic footnote in a culture that had abolished history. Or a tethered spectre in the form of a flapping black crow. Determined to squeeze a few last ...”

“... John le Carré has patiently established himself over the last twenty-five years as the discriminating reader’s favourite thriller writer. The BBC’s adaptations of the George Smiley trilogy in 1979 and 1982 made him almost overnight a popular author on the Ian Fleming scale, and it can have done no harm that the TV version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy coincided with the Blunt scandal ...”

“... a stormy night with the discovery of a dead man in a barn, carrying papers that identify him as “John Whitaker”,’ Macintyre writes. ‘By dint of some distinctly plodding detective work, Inspector Richardson discovers that every document in the pockets of the dead man has been ingeniously forged: his visiting cards, his bills, and even his passport, on ...”

“... If John Bampfylde has any continuing public existence, it must be as the man on the right in this unusual double portrait by Joshua Reynolds. An interested enquirer might learn that Bampfylde was a minor poet of the later 18th century and, in the absence of much hard information, encounter what is scarcely more than a striking anecdote of frustrated love and subsequent insanity ...”

“... intentions were given little credence back home. One such was the Dutch Military Attaché, Major Gijsbert Sas, whose intuitive fears were greatly heightened when he made contact with a member of Canaris’s counter-intelligence department, Colonel Hans Oster, who was for a time privy to the innermost secrets of Hitler and his military planners. All the ...”