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“... of abstinence and prayer. Bluewater’s anodyne aquarium walkways provoke many such dramas. The Kenneth Baker anthology of uplifting poems, in relief on every wall, incubates rage. I was ready to tear out the tablets with my fingernails and smash them down on the heads of inoffensive mall-grazers. A Tate Modern gallery of male underwear fails to excite ...”

“... and the joke monsters like Hamilton, but the day-in, day-out ignominy of being ruled by men like Kenneth Baker and Norman Fowler, John Wakeham and Michael Howard; of turning on your TV to see Michael Heseltine in a combat jacket, or Ann Widdecombe waving a pair of handcuffs, or Michael Portillo talking about ‘three letters which send a chill down the ...”

“... Union: The UK as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind and members of the so-called Democracy Taskforce set up by the Tories in opposition and headed by Ken Clarke, have over the past decade proposed various means of ironing out post-devolutionary wrinkles in the British political ...”

“... bridled. This pressure has apparently continued since Mrs T’s departure, including lunches with Kenneth Baker, dinner parties at Tristan Garel-Jones’s with the likes of Douglas Hurd, and a proper nosh-up with the brown sauce man in person – Mr Major. But everything has so far foundered on the inability of the Tories to promise Owen and his two ...”

“... through the Eighties. In 1988, the Prime Minister is telling him that Howe is a blancmange, Kenneth Baker is wet, Nigel Lawson wants to go and make money but is being kept in post at her request, and John Major is her most likely successor. Perhaps more to the point, she had a message for her good friend. By this time, his own days at the Express ...”

“... to the Holocaust are very close to home. Who would do such things? Some would do them to animals: Kenneth Baker (with his legislation against dangerous dogs), all those cheerful researchers in the biomedical sciences and the people from the council’s pest control department. But who would do such things to human beings? Any of the above who made a ...”

“... that Thomas has given some hostages to the propagandist ‘discourse of Englishness’ (as when Kenneth Baker, introducing his anthology of English History in Verse, pronounces that ‘the two glories of this country are the English landscape and English literature’). Robert Wells’s essay ‘Edward Thomas and England’ (in The Art of Edward ...”

“... Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley and a strange breed of suburban Brylcreem boys – John Moore, Kenneth Baker, Jeffrey Archer and, pre-eminently, Cecil Parkinson. What they have in common is a dreadful smarminess, a smoothly blatant insincerity which apparently nothing can puncture – Baker’s own recent memoirs ...”

“... classic texts was what the Right wanted. To everyone’s surprise, however, the then minister, Kenneth Baker, hid his distaste for the Cox Report, and even Mrs Thatcher demanded only minor amendments. It was left to their successors to overturn it. The first sign of trouble to come was over the GCSE, the examination which is taken by all ...”

“... to the personal enthusiasm of successive Conservative ministers of education, Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the devastating consequences of abandoning ...”

“... the family have to be taken away to a place of safety; the boy is later released. The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ...”

“... all amenable to justice’ – and the jury found accordingly. And when a later Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker, ignored a court order requiring him to bring back a Zairean asylum-seeker whom his department had deported while the man was seeking the protection of the courts, the House of Lords in a major vindication of the rule of law held ...”

“... Sometimes,’ a woman says during phone sex in Vox, Nicholson Baker’s first foray into smut, ‘I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I’d be turned into a mist and I would rematerialise in the room of the person I’m talking to.’ That’s more or less how people get to the House of Holes – a sexual spa resort, offering expensive bespoke treatments, located in a parallel dimension ...”

“... a sideboard in the throes of a spiritual crisis, and the blue and gold Madonna of the Atlantic, by Kenneth Shoesmith, which was wheeled into the first-class drawing room on Sundays for Catholic mass. The Queen Mary was perhaps the most stylish of the British liners. Cunard, wary on the one hand of cutting-edge functionalism while resisting on the other ‘the ...”

“... induction into the Matter of Britain. It’s not easy to read the third part among the weird Kenneth Baker anthology that is Poets’ Corner. Dylan Thomas summoned alongside Henry James. A sampler of dubious quotations. A head of Blake with gaping Bedlam sockets instead of eyes. The Tate no longer has its Blake watercolours in glass cases under felt ...”