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“... the book to the appropriate Foreign Office committees. In 2005 when the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, decided the book shouldn’t be published until the ministers involved were out of office, Greenstock accepted the ban with no public protest. He went on, as planned before he wrote the book, to take up a post running the British deep state’s ...”

“... growl ‘Basilisks!’ He has seen changes and revolutions, castles falling, dunghills rising, Jack as good as his master. In private how bitterly he mocks them, shivering slaves who always finish up their gossipy tales with a wheedling ‘Mind you, I said nothing!’ Not that anybody would ever be so tactless as to press him about some gossip that he has ...”

“... society hostess, was that evening minding her own business in her own nice home in the company of Jack Nicholson and three hundred others. She had, understandably, drawn the line at Rupert and Min, who seem to have been upset by this. Rupert’s idea of a Water Board worker was a man with an Irish accent. He tried out his ‘vague leprechaun lilt’ on Nona ...”

“... to little long-term effect. Harman and her three sisters were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but ...”

“... oxygen (pioneered by First World War bomber pilots) Major Edward Norton of the British Army and a London surgeon, Howard Somervell, got to 28,126 feet, less than 900 feet below the summit, at which height the atmosphere holds only a third of the oxygen we breathe at sea level. Four days later Mallory, who was 38, around the peak age for physical ...”

“... with Sinatra was a serious three-line whip: beg off early, fall asleep, order a coffee instead of Jack Daniels, and you risked expulsion, exile, the Antarctica of his disaffection. He could not abide the ends of days: it was one thing he had no control over. So he made an enemy of the clock, of merely human time, each night’s feeble apocalypse: that dire ...”

“... unusually eclectic mix of pop, new wave, disco and US house as the sun came up. They came back to London and started their own parties, kickstarting the ‘second summer of love’ the following year: a time when dancers dressed in dungarees and baggy T-shirts, football hooligans laid down their arms, and smiley faces became the emblem of acid house. All ...”

“... Hadley, the Thatcherite singer in an otherwise left-leaning band, was holding a glass of Jack Daniels. He seemed in touch with his audience and every bit as drunk. I’m not sure whether the audience knew his politics, but they heard the totemic sound of the 1980s in his voice, and a thousand facets of contemporary Britain seemed to sparkle in his ...”

“... Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders Green, otherwise known as Goldberg Green or the Polish Corridor. We were to live in Teignmouth Road ...”

“... and novel an attack. He was also present at the midnight meeting called to question ‘Jolly Jack’ Profumo about his private life. Profumo lied like a trooper. Martin Redmayne, who was without doubt the worst Chief Whip since the war, failed to see through his mendacity, though his job was to know the strengths and weaknesses of his flock. I am ...”

“... Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the Spanish Civil War from Barcelona (where he gets drunk with Hemingway), is recruited to Naval Intelligence by Ian Fleming and dispatched to Portugal to spy on the Duke and Duchess of ...”

“... A girl and three men are riding westward from London when a fifth rider joins them, a man in a red coat and dragoon’s hat. The year is 1736 and they are on horseback. Arriving at a Devonshire country inn, they tell the innkeeper and an intrusive parson about themselves and the purpose of their journey, but we suspect them of lying ...”

“... rabies. Then there are the gases: methane, hydrogen sulphide, and fumes from whichever effluents London businesses have poured down their drains and toilets today. A form is handed to me, as I stand in the robing section of the Thames Water van, struggling with my waders. The van is well equipped, with a table and microwave, a small TV and a basin and ...”

“... scaffolds which they have erected give their players room to move. The Letter of Marque opens with Jack Aubrey dismissed the service after a conviction for rigging the Stock Market – a crime of which he was innocent. He is set up as master of a private man-of-war by his newly rich friend, Maturin, a Naval physician who also serves the Admiralty as a secret ...”

“... in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger. This man turns out to be Mr Peggotty, who emigrated to Australia with what remained of his family ten years previously, together with the Micawbers. And they have all ...”