“... on his nose. Here he is sniffing the air at the 1990 Wembley concert for the released Mandela: Neil Kinnock sat puffing a pipe, trying to look as people as possible. Jesse Jackson ... with shiny hair and shiny moustache and a camel’s-hair coat and a nose for the television-lens like a fly for shit: each time the camera looked his way he was on his feet ...”

“... One day, in the early years of the 20th century, a poetically-minded young man from the Scottish borders called Christopher Murray Grieve walked to Ecclefechan, the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle. It wasn’t a long way, but his trek was a gesture of hero-worship to one of the greatest Scotsmen and largest egos of the previous century ...”

“... hidden and now was seen. So: beautiful. As the deserted landscape of the moon was beautiful when Neil Armstrong’s camera panned across its uninviting surface. At the same time as these visual feasts were going on in the Women’s Group hut on a disused Freightliner site, I was working in the hut next door, involved in running a Free School for a bunch of ...”

“... Robert Schuller is anything to go by) the satellite channels of a united Europe may one day broadcast the gospel of individual salvation which its inhabitants have long thought fit only for their American cousins. It is worth remembering that the social evolution of Europe may be towards, rather than away from, the social conditions which have ...”

“... always are. Margaret Thatcher may, despite herself, fail to maintain her pretence of leadership. Neil Kinnock may, despite himself, take over. David Owen may come out of his increasingly conservative camouflage to capture that middle ground on which success in British politics has been said, with decreasing plausibility, to rest. None, however, has a ...”

“... birds with names like Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo. When Barry Humphries squawked the other day that he had been pleased to find that Canberra had become a little ‘sleazy’, he was joking. Out of this garden city of good government, on 22 June 1983, flew a telex which read: ‘There appears to be no action which the Australian Federal Police can take ...”

“... and from Infectious to Recovered. These formulae tell us how many people to subtract each day from the Susceptible population and add to the Infectious, and how many to subtract from the Infectious and add to the Recovered. The number of people moved out of the Susceptible group is calculated from the average number of contacts each individual ...”

“... made it. She won a Sunday Referee poetry prize (‘one of the most exquisite word artists of our day’, the adjudication raved), and began to be taken up, and to move in the demi-monde of the arts, meeting writers and painters. There was a ‘tremendous blurb’ about her in the Referee: at a party afterwards she ‘was ghastly embarrassed and nearly went ...”

“... give me a plot. And it works.’ Though sometimes God is not immediately obliging. ‘The other day He was a bit slow; I thought perhaps He is bored with me. I asked my secretaries, bring me up all my research on the Restoration ... you know, George V ... and as it was coming, a voice said, absolutely clearly: “Panama Canal.” I knew nothing about the ...”

“... tolerated. If a pretender to the premiership boasts of having drunk, in his youth, 14 pints in one day, or the current Prime Minister’s son is found paralytic in Leicester Square after downing many pints, it is seen as a manly rite of passage. Beer Street is as wholesomely British as it was in Hogarth’s day (not so Drug ...”

“... books on such subjects as chemical and biological weapons (with Jeremy Paxman), the Falklands War, Neil Kinnock, the Hitler Diaries and Bernard Ingham. A good friend of Peter Mandelson’s, he has long been close to the inner circles of New Labour. As well as there having been no pesky research to slow down the writing of the novel, there was also a strong ...”

“... Iwas​ still half asleep when I heard the story on an early morning TV show one day in April. It was so odd I wondered later if I had dreamed it. But it was true: government authorities in Chechnya had imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast ...”

“... divil Paisley’. Ten years ago, I lugged a video recorder round to her flat so she could watch Neil Jordan’s biopic about the nationalist politician and guerrilla Michael Collins. In the closing sequence, Collins’s fiancée, Kitty, buys her wedding dress, Michael is assassinated by anti-Treatyites in the wilds of County Cork, and Sinead O’Connor ...”

“... was born. Before the 1992 election, it seemed like everything was about to change for the better. Neil Kinnock would be prime minister and football would reclaim its place at the centre of national life. Then John Major won, and two months later England were dumped out of Euro ’92 by Sweden. The Sun put the England manager, Graham Taylor, on the back page ...”

“... could manage a reply. Industrialists, bankers, rich Tories of every description felt that the day of doom was nigh. John Davies, Secretary of State for Industry in the Tory Government and a former Director-General of the CBI, called his children round the hearth to tell them this was the last Christmas of its kind they would be enjoying together. Tony ...”