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“... knew only too well how much work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is ...”

“... eloquence from the polemics, interviews and memoirs included in his two books of non-fiction, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). More recently, we learned something of his comic earthiness, thanks to the witty and profane letters he wrote to his good friend the novelist Albert Murray: their collected correspondence appeared in ...”

“... anticipating her own economic reforms. In Italy, Northern League members of Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet recently proposed Pinochet’s privatisation of Chile’s pension system as the ‘obligatory model’ for their own. In May, General Barry McCaffrey, chief of the US Army Southern Command (with which, contrary to legend, Pinochet’s relations were not ...”

“... famously, the day after the last election: IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT. One (unnamed) Eurosceptic cabinet member said that when the Sun speaks its mind, it ‘shakes the very foundations’ of the Government; most politicians seem easily to accept that the paper’s populist catechism is a genuine and significant representation of opinion. This is made all ...”

“... prewar Paris: poets, lawyers, cyclists, clerics, wrestlers, painters, royalty, cabaret artistes, cabinet ministers, newspaper columnists, a scattering of prominent foreigners. This pop culture social register was ubiquitous (and still is, in the secondary markets of the world), providing a useful map of contemporary celebrity – not exactly fame, since it ...”

“... of consumerism and international cultural exchange – and because the modernisers in Franco’s cabinet had convinced their reluctant and curmudgeonly leader of the need for a more pragmatic authoritarian capitalism: what Franco described in 1968, at the opening of Asturias Airport, as ‘the struggle of markets, the struggle of production’. Even ...”

“... the memory of an ancient curfew is still in their blood; from the time, when at the first fall of shadow, the gates of the ghetto screeched shut with an inviolable monotony that routine had perhaps rendered gentle and familiar to them, a reminder that night was not a time for Jews.Does Jewish time run in a circle or a line? ‘Monotony is the most beautiful ...”

“... roulette. He was posher, by far, than Margaret Thatcher and most of the cowed arrivistes in her Cabinet. And, to cap it all, he’d written several books (both fiction and non-fiction). He had claims to be thought of as an intellectual. Who else, in Thatcher’s Parliament, could say the same? Westminster, in Clark’s diary-portrayal, was peopled almost ...”

“... invasion of Mother’s house, this time a solo effort, is examining the contents of her china cabinet, planning to snaffle a crystal Swarovski owl (wasn’t it he who had bought it for her in the first place – duty free? How could that be stealing?) when he sees Mother’s reflection in a mirror, and realises she has given her bird-carving class a miss ...”

“... 1918, it was Stavisky. For the Fourth Republic, it was the affaire des fuites, when details of Cabinet meetings and security measures were leaked to the Viet-Minh and their Communist allies during the war in Indo-china. For de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, it was the kidnapping and presumed murder of Ben Barka. For his short-lived successor, Pompidou, it was ...”

“... before being recalled by her father in 1940 because of the war. Until she was 40 she dwelt in his shadow, observing a noble and irresolute mind which clung to stronger wills for support and which felt ultimately betrayed by their death or by his faulty judgment of their character. His vital props failed him gradually one by one: first his father, then ...”

“... had for the crimes of the Nazis. The TRC was essentially a special court, convened in the shadow of apartheid law, whose work did not address the legalised exclusion, oppression and exploitation of a racialised majority. In his foreword to the TRC’s five-volume final report, published in 1998, Desmond Tutu celebrated the commission as evidence of ...”

“... of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader. Yet he has been perceived as an unstoppable force, the author of an irreversible transformation ...”

“... to be stopped in Spain too. In another monologue, this one three hours long and addressed to his cabinet in December 1936, he declared that Europe was now divided into two hostile camps. Spain was the theatre in which communism had to be defeated. ‘If there had not been the danger of the Red Peril overwhelming Europe,’ he said in one of his private ...”

“... 1915-16, could also be seen as basically unsoldierly, involving as it did his resignation from the cabinet – surely a dereliction of his real war duty. His excuse was that he wanted some fun. It was, however, an unusual thing to do. As D’Este points out, ‘politicians who start wars rarely experience the results of their actions.’ D’Este praises him ...”