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“... Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush’s economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, estimated that the war would cost $200 billion. ‘Baloney,’ Donald Rumsfeld fumed, offering a figure of $50-60 billion, some of which he said would be supplied by America’s friends. Andrew Natsios, the head of the Agency for International Development, told Ted Koppel on Nightline that postwar Iraq could be rebuilt for $1 ...”

“... president to prime minister and then back again, it is not exactly smoke and mirrors stuff. It’s just out one door and in through another. He doesn’t care that no one is fooled. This is how oligarchies work: the people at the top care much more about their dealings with each other than their dealings with the public. It is also the reason oligarchies ...”

“... and women, dressed more brightly than anyone else: the vegetable dyes of the period faded quickly, so that colour was a mark of status. Purple was the royal colour, forbidden to others, but reds and greens were popular. The richer the person, too, the better the quality of the cloth (wool, linen, silk), the more elaborate the lace of collars and cuffs, the ...”

“... biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right ...”

“... a highly laconic and perfected style he gives such a clear and accurate description of the piano’s characteristics that it is all I can do not to give it in full. Heinrich Neuhaus, The Art of Piano Playing I quote too much. Give me a good line – what am I saying? Give me a good paragraph – even a Proustian one – and I’ll shove it into my own prose ...”

“... lookout, in line with the crannog, the tiny island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the lee of the hill, makes me think it must be an old stone cabin, how old I don’t know, but it would have been inhabited by Gaelic speakers who cut hay on the two hidden meadows ...”

“... is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations. The Bank of England takes emergency action to stave off financial panic following the ‘mini-budget’. David Bowie implores ...”

“... face and three younger companions. He smiles and nods. As lunch proceeds, recognition dawns. It’s the brutish one-time hard-core Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in ...”

“... no possible circumstance acquire European territory by war, but it still did not want Russia to do so, and it became a cardinal point of British policy that Turkey should be protected for as long as possible, which plainly made Russia a potential antagonist. Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte ...”

“... Broad-shouldered, intense and handsome, he looks like a statesman – the antithesis, purposefully so, of the stock image of the degraded slave.Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Maryland in 1818, to a white man (probably a slaveholder) and an enslaved woman, Harriet Bailey. As he put it in his 1845 memoir, Narrative of the Life of ...”

“... At that age, we were brimming with nastiness. I grew up on a scheme in the last of Scotland’s New Town developments. There were lots of children, lots of dogs and lots of building sites. Torture among our kind was fairly commonplace. I remember two furious old teachers driving me and my six-year-old girlfriend Heather Watt home early one morning. In ...”

“... Tory MPs, including Sir George’s. Or was it the announcement the following week that everybody’s pension should be lobbed into the grateful fingers of the insurance and pension companies which had so successfully swindled four billion pounds from half a million workers in previously safe occupational schemes? Or was it ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about ...”

“... hand cream, woodland burials, wind turbines and newspaper columns reassuring readers that it’s OK to own a washing machine: a certain version of pastoral is more fashionable than ever. ‘In a time of informational overload,’ John Updike wrote in an introduction to Walden, ‘of clamorously inane and ubiquitous electronic entertainment, and of a ...”

“... is a serious exhibition.1 The pictures themselves signal it with heavy colour: first, black, grey, brown, mud and rust, and, in later pictures strong reds and yellows (when he could afford it – earth colours are cheap). Thick paint – in early pictures so thick that it seems to parody all its Expressionist precursors ...”