“... an aide scribbling on a pad during coffee on the sofa. There might, after all, be something to be said for ‘the hard grind’.The​ veteran political correspondent Peter Oborne is unrepentantly nostalgic for the old order. He begins his philippic, The Assault on Truth, by quoting two sentences in the Ministerial Code: ‘It is of paramount importance that ...”

“... first words of her lovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me; I believed at once everything she said … I have never seen a more comical figure than Sarah in the second act, where she appears in a simple dress, and yet one soon stops laughing, for every inch ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not ...”

“... Samuels perpetrated the occasional stinker, and lest the above be taken for a pasting, let it be said that Meryle Secrest has written an entertaining, readable, often very perceptive biography which by no stretch of the imagination could be called vindictive or sensational. And although her style and temper differ sharply from Samuels’s, the early chapters ...”

“... as the emperor’s new clothes, and just as revolutionary. Everybody “got it”. But nobody said it.’ It was a gesture, he concludes, as radical as Wilde’s, who used ‘effeminacy’ to express cultural disaffection instead of finding himself disaffected because, as it happened, he was an effeminate man. Hickey’s preference for undisguised ...”

“... mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was associating with people who were infinitely my social ...”

“... was already there. But when it came to the Underground, London did reach out, to the countryside. Edward Watkin, who became chairman of the Metropolitan in 1872, drove the Underground overground for 35 miles, to Aylesbury, in order to further his ambition to build mainline railways linking England and France through a Channel tunnel. He failed in that, but ...”

“... David Lynch’s​ films seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s what he said, anyway. Ideas were ‘little gifts … They just come into your head and it’s like Christmas morning.’ One moment he would be thinking about Bobby Vinton’s 1963 cover of ‘Blue Velvet’; the next thing he knew, a severed ear was lying in a field ...”

“... are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always said she had preferred living in Mile End because the markets were better over there, but at least Westfield was near her now in White City. She was 31. ‘I was born in Egypt 11,426 days ago,’ she told one of her neighbours, pleased with the new app on her ...”

“... to being compared with Holmes. As Lewis Thomas is none of these things, he will not mind it being said that his opening paragraph is very much in Holmes’s style: ‘I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember. It isn’t so much that I forget things outright, I forget where I stored them. I need reminders, and when the reminders change, as ...”

“... his adult life hoping to lead. In the first general election of that year, Powell refused to back Edward Heath, the prime minister who had successfully negotiated Britain’s entry into the EEC. Both Powell and Heath concluded that the former’s lack of support cost the latter his job. In the second election of 1974, Powell went further and effectively told ...”

“... Observer cannot itself improve Lonrho’s image, which is still tarnished in the public mind by Edward Heath’s harsh description of it as representing ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. The paper’s former editor, David Astor, has said it is hard to see how the Observer can avoid being either dead or ...”

“... that myself, at the age of four, could identify by name any or all of the coloured plates in Edward Step’s Wayside and Woodland Blossoms ... not content with the English names, I memorised many of the Latin and Greek ones as well. Some of these (at the age of eight) I conceitedly incorporated in a school essay ... The headmaster read the essay aloud to ...”

“... that appears in its first chapter: racial capitalism. The ‘promise of the term’, Arun Kundani said in a lecture in 2020, ‘lies in its apparent bridging of the economic and the cultural, of the class struggle and the struggle against white supremacy, allowing us to understand police and plantation violence as linked to capital accumulation’. Robinson ...”

“... seen poker played is in The Cincinnati Kid, you’ll have watched Steve McQueen lose everything to Edward G. Robinson in one hand of five-card stud; if your family played around the kitchen table when you were a child, it’s likely the game was five-card draw. But if you have played poker for real in the last five years, it will almost certainly have been a ...”