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“... back out into space. The existence of the effect was first posited in 1859 by the Irish scientist John Tyndall, who said that without the greenhouse effect ‘the warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost’. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius added to ...”

“... mutual regard between the two leaders. Eden’s turn against Nasser came with the dismissal of Sir John Glubb as Chief of Staff of the Arab Legion in March 1956. Glubb Pasha, writes Kyle, ‘was a British newspaper reader’s legend’. With his fall the reality of Britain’s diminished role in the Middle East suddenly struck home. Eden, it should be ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”

“... compensates for any parsimony in the archival evidence available to him. For example, in 1945 Sir John Colville recorded in his diary, since published and now firmly in the public domain: ‘I don’t like the would-be ingratiating way in which Macmillan bares his teeth.’ Davenport-Hines digresses at some length, starting from the observation that ...”

“... of the intergovernmental talks was the frank relationship between the British prime minister, John Major, and his Irish counterpart, Albert Reynolds. ‘It went all right – I chewed his bollocks off and he took a few lumps outa me,’ Reynolds announced casually after he and Major had emerged from an hour-long one-on-one meeting. On 15 December 1993 the ...”

“... success. Thatcher’s government was able to satisfy enough of the electorate enough of the time: John Major paid the penalty. The present government has gone on about benefit fraud and claimed that cuts will stiffen the backbone of the poor, but it has primarily justified its policies on economic grounds, claiming that the private sector will pick up the ...”

“... SNP and the SLP were destroyed, and the stridently anti-devolution Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street. This depressing course of events did, however, make possible a complete rethinking of nationalist arguments. The SNP went through several decades of uncomfortable revision and policy reformulation. Maxwell recognised that European integration ...”

“... but as home secretary he came into his own.One of Sidmouth’s spies, a man called John Castle, was on the action committee responsible for organising the huge and supposedly peaceful meeting of reformers on Spa Fields that was to be addressed by the mellifluous Orator Hunt. Castle tirelessly whipped up the labourers who had just been laid off ...”

“... and drunken disorder. It was actually a French victory, but there was now a new prime minister in Downing Street to take the credit. In January the government had been defeated on a parliamentary motion submitted by the Radical MP John Roebuck which called for an inquiry into the conduct or misconduct of the war. Aberdeen ...”

“... to another, which can become a fairly gentle way of describing your own personal history, too. John Smith, the late Labour leader, believed a devolved Scottish parliament was ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. He died too young and is buried now on the Isle of Iona, in what is thought to have been the graveyard of the Scottish kings. There’s ...”

“... the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to his, A Matter of Principle, published in 2011, in which he praises her ‘constancy, resolve ...”

“... out into the green and pleasant suburbs. All of this changed over the following two decades.As John Davis points out, the idea that London started to ‘swing’ in the 1960s was largely the concoction of journalists in need of a story, most of them American. But in Soho and on the King’s Road in Chelsea, ideas were taking shape that would eventually ...”

“... journals for 1986, quoted in The Murdoch Archipelago: Wednesday 1 October. A message to speak to Downing Street urgently. The Prime Minister wanted me to know before the official announcement . . . that Duke Hussey was to be the new chairman [of the BBC] . . . I was shattered. Wyatt’s worry was that Murdoch had recommended Hussey, an establishment dud, to ...”

“... in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to ...”

“... on the telephone, that he will very soon have to ‘disappear’. The discovery of authors such as John Cowper Powys, about whom Vaes knows nothing, is paralleled in his reinvention of London districts such as Kensal Rise, Shadwell and Fulham. Remaining in Belgium, he finds another London with which he is comfortable: a ‘malleable’ capital with more appeal ...”