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“... of Crossman’s on the opposite side. In Parliament, he was overtaken by younger men – George Brown, Jim Callaghan, even Denis Healey. When Labour returned to power in 1964, he was given the important, but hardly central, office of President of the Board of Trade. Three years later, he was brutally and unceremoniously sacked. Since then, he has hung on in ...”

“... of SIS, and – most of all – the uniforms of East German dinginess: the white socks and brown shoes that ‘Smith’ wears, the ‘hand-me-down Marlene’ clothes worn by ‘Michaela’, the cheap synthetic track-suits of the former Stasi officers. It comes as no surprise that when Markus Wolf strolls into these pages he is tall and ...”

“... particular, without whose endorsement the assent of the people cannot be assured. If either Gordon Brown or Tony Blair needs to summon the British electorate out of their armchairs in order finally to see the other off, then he will. But otherwise we probably shouldn’t wait by the phone. The Daily Mail has taken advantage of this hiatus in the high politics ...”

“... years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his system. Whatever his reasons, he tries to discover in this well-crafted memoir, which is effectively a joint biography of his parents and himself – a difficult undertaking ...”

“... from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now. The extent of the continued underfunding of the public ...”

“... and demeanour, going so far as to caption one photograph: ‘Sofia Marie changed her dark brown hair to blonde because it looks more angelic’. Mass communications, and their prime instrument, the photograph, have proved crucial in the history of supernatural phenomena. The Martin sisters had a plate camera in the convent and passed happy hours of ...”

“... and local tycoon. Recently, however, she has taken up with Gavin (‘slenderly-featured’ with ‘brown, black-lashed eyes’). She tells Attercliffe she is giving up Gavin and leaving Maurice. She is coming back to Walton Lane to live with her children and without Attercliffe. Attercliffe disagrees. They have an argument. It is the first of several similar ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... was the occasion on which Eliot, at Pound’s behest, delivered a parcel containing a pair of old brown shoes to a distinctly unappreciative James Joyce. The shoes apart, Eliot was having a good time. He considered Lewis the most profitable person he had had to talk to for a long time. In Saumur, Lewis fell off his bicycle, and was soon looking for someone to ...”

“... of different kinds of grain crops, alternating with green fields or roots, and here and there a brown fallow, was now an expanse of prairie.’ Street started contributing to the local papers and went on to write dozens of books, with a column in Farmers Weekly and an appearance on Desert Island Discs. Only three minutes of the programme survive, which may ...”

“... idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one thing, they cast light on the hopes and fears most of us entertain in the face of government activity of all sorts. Realists who ...”

“... the novel power of social media to drum up interest and financial support. His campaign manager David Plouffe liked to say of Obama’s candidacy: ‘Walking a tightrope without a net … That’s when we are at our best.’ Yet when Obama does make a misstep – and inevitably there are plenty, from dismissing Clinton as ‘likeable enough’, to ...”

“... working-class boys often wear for Sunday best in cheap imitation of their fathers: the jacket was brown and the trousers were blue, and both garments were in a state of considerable disrepair. They looked at me in my grey flannels and the grammar school blazer which, on the advice of my mother, I had decided to ‘wear out’ on the job, since I would have no ...”

“... of the responsible politician, who knows that there will be difficult choices – what Gordon Brown likes to call ‘tough decisions’ – and that the attainment of political ends always involves treating some people as means and not as ends (or, in McCartney’s sanitised version, ‘disappointing’ them). In other words, New Labour understands the ...”

“... Dylan’s ‘barbed-wire tonsils’ (Ian Hamilton’s words), his ‘voice like sand and glue’ (David Bowie’s). ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Ricks says in his chapter on ‘Pride’, is saved ‘from being – in all its vituperative exhilaration – even more damnably proud than the person whom it damns and blasts . . . There can be felt in the refrain an ...”