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“... government instead fell to his younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif, who became prime minister. The new cabinet is filled with Shahbaz’s allies in the PML-N. But the weak showing for his party meant that he also needed the support of the PPP, which was able to finesse many of the most important constitutional positions – including the presidency, now held by ...”

“... disarmament – he was against it, in what is usually put down to a compromise incumbent on him as shadow foreign secretary. He died in 1960, aged 62, leaving the British left with one of its few great legends, the story of a working-class socialist politician pushing against the limits of the Labour Party. Thomas-Symonds’s biography has a perfunctory ...”

“... with oatmeal. The population was swelling, and a demographic crisis had long been looming up. Its shadow helped to set going the ‘emigration mania’ of the 1770s, which carried away twenty thousand Scots, not all of them destitute, some of them small employers. But far more were soon leaving under compulsion of necessity, or landlord greed, and these are ...”

“... reform in London. (They also led to A New London, a book written with Mark Fisher, then Labour’s Shadow Minister for the Arts and Culture, which was essentially the Labour Party’s environment manifesto for the 1992 election.) In 1995, Rogers became the first architect to deliver the Reith Lectures. He spoke about the radical opportunities offered by ...”

“... rock ’n’ roll epoch. ‘Nice’ working-class boys like Tebbutt’s father grew up in the long shadow of the Great War. Many fathers didn’t return from the Western Front, or did so ruined in body or mind. Bernard Scott, who grew up in Stockport after the war, described it as a ‘town of broken men’, with crippled and deformed ex-soldiers selling ...”

“... the Supreme Court – but especially in the case of the Court, Bush v. Gore will cast a very long shadow. According to the living Constitution, the American President is the leading symbol of the nation, the bearer of a democratic mandate, the engine of domestic change and international commitment. This commanding office is largely a creation of the 20th ...”

“... and again, when faced with a political difficulty, Blair takes himself away from his advisers and cabinet colleagues in order to sit and think on his own. But he does not limit himself to contemporary politics. He also likes to dig down into the past, looking for the solutions that escaped some of his predecessors. The most arresting example of this comes ...”

“... but it was Lord Deedes, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and a former Conservative cabinet minister, who brought their lordships down to earth. At the risk of causing hurt looks from my own front bench, I see no likelihood of this Government giving much encouragement to legislation which will antagonise the press. It is better to be blunt. The ...”

“... Sunday, the News of the World splashed the story. Four months later, Blunkett resigned from the cabinet. We now know the answer to Blunkett’s question. The News of the World – first when Rebekah Brooks was editor, then under Coulson – hacked the phones of hundreds of people. In July 2011, after a long cover-up collapsed, Rupert Murdoch closed the ...”

“... only grab a pussy: he can’t be one.) When Obama tried to discuss a no-first-use declaration, his cabinet quickly dissuaded him. Although he achieved the nuclear agreement with Iran, averting a potential war, and expressed symbolic atonement on his visit to Hiroshima, he also oversaw a programme of nuclear modernisation, with a commitment to a trillion ...”

“... calmly wandered off to exchange her box. Some critics have suggested that he started making his shadow boxes to amuse Robert, or that he was influenced by the miniaturised life of Robert’s train set. Deborah Solomon finds no evidence for this, though it appears that the meals Joseph made for Robert ‘always consisted of the most incredible colours ... He ...”

“... the essence. Indeed, for all his considerable success in bouncing a reluctant prime minister and Cabinet to accept the new system of select committees in 1979, Norman St John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might ...”

“... Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the 75-year-old defence minister, often described as ‘Mubarak’s shadow’ (and, in US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks, as his ‘poodle’), is not known to look fondly on democracy, or indeed on anything that might weaken the power of the military, which has dominated Egyptian politics since 1952. Tantawi and his men ...”

“... Only months later the Poulson affair burst into public view. When Maudling refused to resign, the cabinet secretary cleverly insisted that the Metropolitan Police be involved in the inquiry. Since Maudling could hardly be the minister responsible for the Met and simultaneously the object of a Met inquiry, he was forced to step down. Amazingly, Thatcher later ...”

“... and analytical volume, which is also more compact, and just as well written, were lost in the shadow of Jenkins’s greater fame. But does any of this justify the enterprise? Well, if Jenkins’s name – and also, it’s fair to add, his reputation as a political biographer – attracts more interest in this kind of subject than would have come to it ...”