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“... upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the Etonian’s ...”

“... This revolt against the era and ethos of the CBCs (Bill Clinton, Blair, Bush Jr, Brown, Cameron and Hillary Clinton) offered the giddy prospect of ‘a jailbreak from the old order’, filling its supporters with ‘energy and glee’. Barnett respects ‘the audacity of those I know who voted to Leave. They are not racists, they are ...”

“... my hair. You need it worse than I do.’ Thy need, or necessity or whatever, is greater than mine. Norman Mailer’s book about Gilmore is a work of genius in its range, depth and restraint. It has speed, which Gilmore had, and patience, which he had not. It has lucidity, even when dealing with legal entanglements. It has forbearance, even when witnessing ...”

“... foundational is required, and at such moments politicians have recourse to party tradition. In the Cameron era, the Conservatives have happily aligned the Big Society concept of charities and volunteers with the ‘little platoons’ championed by their acknowledged forebear, the political philosopher Edmund Burke. One of the few intellectual stars on the ...”

“... its style more personal and episodic and its condemnation of the missionaries more unequivocal. Norman Lewis is a writer of unusual anthropological sensibility with an honourable record in the field: government policy in Brazil was changed as a result of the international protests which followed his campaigning article in the Sunday Times on the massacres ...”

“... which we discover in ourselves when we ask why we find it hard not to smile at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic illustrations to the Idylls of the King. Historians of photography inform us that photographers, having vainly endeavoured to imitate paintings in order to be artistic, came eventually to see their folly. But ...”

“... with time.’ Since In Cold Blood, murderers have been a staple of the non-fiction novel, from Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song to Gordon Burn’s horribly fascinating books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West. Andrew Hankinson’s new book dramatises the last days of Raoul Moat, the Newcastle bouncer and bodybuilder who in July 2010 ...”

“... have faced repeated assaults from the same political quarter as conceived and promoted them. David Cameron announced that he felt ‘physically sick’ at the Strasbourg court’s ruling that the UK’s blanket ban on prisoners voting was a disproportionate interference with a fundamental right, evidently forgetting that people serving up to 12 months in jail ...”

“... in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true that the Anglo-American political culture holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, ...”

“... see if we can reach a different agreement and perhaps you could have a second agreement.’ David Cameron ridiculed this scenario: a refusal to accept the democratic implications of a vote to leave would cause an explosion of justified outrage. He would be honour-bound to activate Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty the next day and set in motion the procedure ...”

“... None other than the most drippingly ‘wet’ of the dissidents in Thatcher’s first cabinet, Norman St John-Stevas. And which Tory journalist then working at the Conservative Research Department issued a warning in the aftermath of the 1964 defeat that the party was seen to represent ‘what might be termed the capital gains classes’? Why, Nigel ...”

“... bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to save ...”

“... tale. Anti-semitism was not uncommon in postwar Britain, whether among the establishment (Montagu Norman, for example, the governor of the Bank of England, was notoriously anti-semitic) or on the street – in 1947 there were anti-semitic riots in several British cities. In 1948, there were race riots of a different kind in Liverpool, when white mobs attacked ...”

“... when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise wasn’t the downfall of May’s advisers so much as their earlier rise to brief but utter dominance in a party whose upper reaches have in recent times seemed to belong almost exclusively to Old Etonians. Hill was born in ...”

“... institutions and individuals in the United States. There are the usual suspects: William Kristol, Norman and John Podhoretz and the circle around them, Pat Robertson and Rick Santorum, whom Murdoch supported for the presidency. He employed and was friendly with Roy Cohn, Senator McCarthy’s unpleasant little helper. When anti-Communism ran out of ...”