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“... market – was playful rather than integral to his message. The co-architect of New Labour, Gordon Brown, went a few steps further, attempting to rehabilitate Smith, not without some plausibility, as a proponent of ‘the helping hand’. In part this manoeuvre was prompted by local piety, for Brown was brought up and has ...”

“... of which was too much even for Parliament, and did a lot to damage the reputation of the Blair and Brown governments. After the 2001 election Blair decided that Robin Cook was insufficiently on message and replaced him with Straw, which meant that Straw was in the Foreign Office throughout the Iraq War. It would be testing for any autobiographer to explain ...”

“... To think back at all is to fall quickly, almost instinctively, on two names – Colin, the name of my adoptive father, and Maureen, the name of my adoptive mother – and on the significant word ‘adopted’, which has the weight of a name. Appended to this little trio of terms, like an intake of breath at the end of a short annoucement, is the nameless presence of the ‘birth mother’, as she’s mostly called by adoption experts: the first mother, that’s to say, also the eternal mother-in-waiting ...”

“... on Swift, Pope and Prior, as well as a host of lesser-known figures, including Charles Cotton, Tom Brown and William King. Among the most conspicuous features of early 18th-century Menippean satire was the cod scholarly apparatus. Mandeville’s generically unstable Fable, with its core tale written in verse and its flabbily unstructured prose ...”

“... must have been picked some time ago. The ‘outstanding achievement’ prize goes to General Colin Powell, and will be presented by Barbara Walters. The ‘humanitarian’ award goes to Diana Spencer and will be presented by Henry Kissinger. In other words, a single well-placed grenade could remove the whole beating heart of the international celebrity ...”

“... He is happy to admit to the various and necessary time-saving devices, back-scratchings and brown-nosings that other writers do their best to disavow. At the end of What a Carve Up! (1994) Coe acknowledges the work of Frank King, and writes: ‘the only repayment I can offer him is to recommend that readers make every effort to seek out these and other ...”

“... she then cooks and offers to the detectives when they come looking for the murder weapon. Father Brown would have loved it, though like most of Dahl’s stories it has the emotional boniness of a shaggy dog story: it rests on a sharp punchline, but there is no love for or between the people in it. The tales from this period generally conclude with a snappy ...”

“... Corbyn isn’t likely to prove a doughty champion of the Union. Moreover – the efforts of Gordon Brown apart – there has been a striking lack of imagination and verve in pro-Union campaigning. Better Together was known – by friend and foe alike – as Project Fear, but it was hardly remarkable for its spine-chilling flair. The baton now passes from the ...”

“... moment which anticipated the notorious Granita conversation of 1994 between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he told Stafford Cripps that ‘any time you wish it I shall always be ready to retire in your favour.’ As Bew remarks, ‘That conversation hung in the air for a number of years.’ For, when the ailing and assailed Lansbury formally stepped down in ...”

“... The earliest tale – and it is very much a tale ‘told me by an old Sicilian whose face was brown and seamed like the bark of an oak’ – is ‘Fly Away Finger, Fly Away Thumb’, which appeared in the London Mystery Magazine in 1953. In it a conjurer is imprisoned by a group of Sicilian brigands. He cuts off his finger and thumb, which walk out of ...”

“... Colin Kidd’s study of Scottish Unionism goes, as he himself insists, sternly against the prevailing ideological current, which is focused on the emergence of political nationalism in both Scotland and Wales. Kidd thinks his book will serve its purpose if it unsettles this debate, and brings about a revision of ‘the basic categories of political analysis ...”

“... Not at all: The Trojan, from the Main beheld a Wood, Which thick with Shades, and a Brown Horror, stood: Betwixt the Trees the Tyber took his Course, With Whirlpools dimpled; and with downward Force That drove the Sand along, he took his Way, And rowl’d his yellow Billows to the Sea. Dryden, whose translation this is from, is good to read ...”

“... has some ten thousand members. However, as James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University, reassures us, his colleagues in the discipline have themselves a very defective grasp of American political culture. In particular, Morone believes that political scientists are in thrall to the misguided notion that the classical liberalism ...”

“... The new Parliament has not attracted major politicians. Labour heavyweights, such as Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, stayed in London; even Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, decided after a term in the Scottish Parliament that he preferred to abandon Edinburgh for the clubbability of Westminster. More significantly, after only a year as first minister ...”

“... seat out of Labour’s grip. The defeat, according to a contemporary Nationalist observer, Oliver Brown, sent a shiver along the Labour benches ‘looking for a spine to run up’. The Scottish Labour vote was managed at this point by Willie Ross, who was secretary of state for Scotland between 1964 and 1970, and again from 1974 until the retirement of his ...”