“... at the BBC he made a half-cooked documentary about his estrangement from his family (‘even at home with my own parents I felt a shame-faced irritation with the tempo of a pickle-jar style of living’) which to his astonishment caused considerable resentment among his family and neighbours. His shame at the headline ‘Miner’s Son at Oxford Ashamed of ...”

“... many papers before it, was investigating how Mandelson could afford to purchase a Notting Hill home, have it done up by a minimalist designer with a maximum rate-card, while buying a £70,000 house in Hartlepool, dressing in Savile Row suits and patronising the best restaurants. (The questions have still not been answered, incidentally. We now know ...”

“... an old lady, and since Norman’s introduction to the world of work had been via an old people’s home on Tyneside old ladies held no terrors for him. To Norman she was his employer, but her age made her as much patient as Queen and in both capacities to be humoured, though this was, it’s true, before he woke up to how sharp she was and how much wasted. She ...”

“... them from one far-flung posting to the next. Sometimes parents sought to leave their children at home while they travelled abroad. Joseph Galloway was reluctant to drag his daughter across the Atlantic with him. ‘It was at first my resolution to leave her. It was also her inclination to stay. But with whom could I leave her?’ he wondered. Patriot ...”

“... and one of Jeeves (‘London’s Finest Dry Cleaners’), but in 1501 this was Wynkyn de Worde’s home and printing house: he rented a former inn for £3 6s 8d a year from a priory in Buckinghamshire. De Worde would have looked out at the cistern house of the Fleet River; on a weekday morning now, the glass and chrome of Shoe Lane is full of suited ...”

“... part of the new DIY fad (it developed into a chapter in Theatres of Memory). Had I ever been to home improvement superstores like B&Q? (I had.) Did they sell new cornices and dado rails or fake wrought iron? (They did.) Could we meet to talk about it? We talked, we courted and were married within a year. Meeting Raphael’s family, I was once more swept off ...”

“... bring back memories of a similar disaster at Bolton in 1946. We never took a Sunday paper at home but sometimes saw the News of the World when we went down to Grandma’s on a Sunday night, and I think I knew at 11 years old that there was something wrong about the gusto with which the tragic story was written up, and something prurient about the way I ...”

“... you,’ he said, adding, as he flung himself out of The Presence like a schoolboy taking his bat home: ‘I wouldn’t do it for anyone else.’ The fate of the Fur Labelling Order reminded me of Tony Benn’s dedicated efforts, while Postmaster General, to cut the Queen’s head off postage stamps. At the time it seemed to him an important gesture, not to ...”

“... waited five weeks for a decision and I can’t wait any longer. I shall tell Lady Allenby to come home.’ Lloyd George took him by the arm and said, ‘You have waited five weeks, Lord Allenby, wait five minutes more.’ Fuming, Allenby waited – and got what he wanted. Allenby’s emancipatory decree, like others ...”

“... sooner arrived than it had come under the control and guidance of a new set of tribal chiefs, with Lord Northcliffe and the editor of Tit-Bits at its head. There had rapidly come into being what John Carey describes as ‘an alternative culture which bypassed the intellectual and made him redundant’. It was a culture that used itself up as it went along, but ...”

“... of violence, hypocrisy and will by which slave-driving settlers such as W.C. Wentworth, ‘the lord of the lash and triangle’, Benjamin ‘Flogger’ Boyd and John MacArthur – all of whom we meet with in the narrative – came to control the land, ‘filling it with blood and the suppuration of needless misery’. What keeps this spirit ...”

“... trod on toes, and made no secret of one or two ignoble yearnings. ‘An ancient name, a stately home and a couple of thousand acres’ would, we understand, have had a calming influence on Evelyn. So, too, with the son. Auberon believes, or so he says, that one of his father’s great missions in life was to ‘make jokes, to turn the world upside down and ...”

“... he didn’t find it hard to carry out something like this. He told me that he had two children at home but that he got used to this work, which he seemed to do with the utmost satisfaction.’ It is almost as if these workmanlike murderers had been asked, as Englishmen were during the war, to ‘Dig for victory’: here was a necessary task, perhaps not an ...”

“... Albanians: Hoxha’s tyranny endures to this day. It may occur to the reader, as it occurred to Lord Selborne (the last head of SOE), that SOE agents, especially those equipped with W/T sets, were admirably placed to establish a post-war intelligence network, as the Russians were doing. We do not know what Churchill would have made of this proposal; Attlee ...”

“... to a remote and moribund feudalism from which George Washington delivered the land of the free and home of the brave once and for all. It is not equality of opportunity which is the issue here. ‘Self-help’ as preached by Samuel Smiles was, after all, a catchword of Victorian England, and ‘the constitution under which we have the good fortune to ...”