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“... Koh-i-Noor diamond, all aroused Victoria’s keen interest. He soon became a regular visitor to Osborne and Windsor and an intimate member of the Royal Family circle. Victoria wanted him to marry her Indian princess godchild, Victoria Gouramma, daughter of the deposed Raja of Coorg, but Duleep confessed his desire to obtain an English wife. The flirtatious ...”

“... decision could be managed politically – something that must haunt Cameron and George Osborne, for all the latter’s daily attempts in the Evening Standard to peddle the idea that this is ‘May’s Brexit crisis’.There is indeed a crisis, but it’s not unmanageable. In late March, Parliament voted to ‘take control’, in the hope of finding ...”

“... of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by condescending arts programmers ...”

“... London – to which superstar American CEOs were lured with the promise of an audience with Elton John and the king in St Paul’s Cathedral (proof, apparently, that Britain is ‘open for business’, or more plausibly that desperate times call for desperate measures) – Starmer switched to a clumsier metaphor. ‘We are in the business of building on our ...”

“... democrats – Blair, but also Clinton, Lagarde, Schröder, Hollande, Rajoy, Renzi, Cameron and Osborne – are continually caught in the revolving door between business and politics. He doesn’t mention either that it was Obama who, as Moyn has put it, ‘enhanced the powers of a presidency, which is now in the hands of a charlatan’, or that in his ...”

“... power differential between central and local government: as chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne spent plenty of time talking about devolving new powers from Westminster in order to create a Northern Powerhouse, but his most effective act of power-sharing was to transfer the burden of responsibility for deficit reduction onto councils, which account ...”

“... set the agenda for coalition with the Lib Dems. It became widely unpopular in 2012, when George Osborne made clear that high-income earners would endure less austerity than everyone else. The polarising effects of the cuts and the rise in university tuition fees then conveniently destroyed the Lib Dem brand and any threat it might have posed to the ...”

“... and the Lambeth riverside that was destroyed by the Albert Embankment, for instance. In the 1870s John Thomson’s portraits of street people in his monthly magazine, Street Life in London, also recorded worlds and social customs that were fast disappearing. Working alongside the socialist journalist Adolphe Smith, Thomson humanises and even heroicises his ...”

“... at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David Cameron, alongside his son-in-law George Osborne.) The 1979 Conservative manifesto barely mentioned privatisation, or denationalisation, as it was sometimes called. In 1968, when an internal party think-tank called the public sector of industry ‘a millstone round our necks’ and proposed some ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... Remain, while feeling little enthusiasm for those who had publicly argued our cause: Cameron, Osborne and the Incredible Vanishing Man who was leading Labour. But both campaigns had been rampantly mendacious, and built on the armature of fear. Towards the end, I asked the table: ‘If it all goes wrong, who will you hate the most: Gove, Johnson, or ...”

“... had been the chairman of Eurotunnel, was appointed to run the Strategic Rail Authority, created by John Prescott in 1999 to give direction to the privatised industry. Morton commissioned a report from Atkins and Ernst & Young to assess whether there was a need for such a line. By the time they reported in 2003, Morton – who was too outspoken to occupy such a ...”

“... and inarticulate as well as the all too fluent opinion-formers, of the Singing Postman as well as John Lennon’. The emphasis here is firmly on the first term of each antithesis, a bias that prefigures the structure of the books which follow. For though Kynaston’s avowed intent is, as far as possible, to let history speak for itself (‘humbly recording ...”

“... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways ...”

“... will sew the disparate limbs together, Chinese investment is the electricity with which George Osborne – the chancellor who promised a Northern Powerhouse – hopes the assembled body might be jolted into life.) Those whose priority in 2016 is the preservation of George Stephenson’s walls and bridges no doubt love railways. But paradoxically they are ...”