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“... make up by espionage. Even comparatively low-level spies like Geoffrey Prime in Britain and the Walker family in the United States are sometimes able to provide priceless technical intelligence. There is recent evidence that from 1976 to 1983 the KGB was able to read France’s diplomatic traffic with its Moscow embassy by bugging an embassy teleprinter ...”

“... Yet Wilson’s biographers say nothing about it; former ministers in charge of oil, like Peter Walker, barely note its existence in their memoirs; and in The Downing Street Years Margaret Thatcher has nothing to say on the matter beyond a reference to the privatisation of ‘Britoil (a nationalised North Sea exploration and production company set up by ...”

“... informing All the Devils Are Here. They offered W.G. Sebald, Seabrook snorts. He’s no melancholy walker. There is nothing ambiguous about the photographs he hammers into his texts. They are pure archive, filched from tabloid libraries: Freddie Mills posing in his trunks (low angle, hard shadows), the murdered Peter Arne (in a blizzard of newsprint ...”

“... this would come to the surface in the form of wild applause for union-busting governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin or Chris Christie of New Jersey. Imagine Nikki Haley’s joy when she saw the first Boeing built in South Carolina roll down the tarmac ‘surrounded by six thousand non-union employees’. That Monday night, after the protest, I met two local ...”

“... myself again included, were convinced that no such window would be allowed to stay open for long. Graham Greene made a visit to Chile in the early Allende years and spent a good deal of time with the supporters of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), who kept on warning that there would be a violent confrontation, engineered by the ruling class and ...”

“... very rich indeed; and the England team never again hit the heights of 1990. When I put all this to Graham Kelly, the FA chief executive who backed the breakaway, he told me forlornly: ‘We were guilty of a tremendous collective lack of vision.’ The TV deal with BSkyB – and the BBC, for highlights – amounted to £305 million. Premier League clubs were ...”

“... Run into Philip and Kersti French in M&S with Philip bent tight over his trolley and using it as a walker. I ask him how he is. ‘Dreadful’. ‘Anything specific?’ ‘Knees. Legs. Lungs. Kidneys … Shall I go on?’ The recital so fluent it’s partly a joke, but looking at him it’s hard not to believe every word. I come out not, I’m sure, having ...”

“... that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget David Trevinnick and Graham Riddick, suspended from their jobs as Parliamentary Private Secretaries over allegations that they had each accepted £1000 in return for tabling Parliamentary written questions. The same ‘cash for questions’ controversy also later accounted for two ...”

“... and that’s not counting the many women who are unable to conceive afterwards (the plot of Graham Swift’s Waterland). Viewers – and there were ten million of them – were forced to see Up the Junction’s storyline as a public health matter, and it became part of a political campaign. But it was also personal. Behind the statistic of 35 deaths a ...”

“... that he shares a name with a distinguished London publisher, is a feral gang leader comparable to Graham Greene’s Pinkie or Irvine Welsh’s Begbie, and already the father of a 15-year-old’s child. Siblings close in age react against each other, to be sure, but it isn’t easy to believe in a family in which a studious schoolgirl rubs shoulders with a ...”

“... allowed to visit the house. ‘It was no uncommon experience,’ Stevenson’s first biographer, Graham Balfour, wrote, ‘for a visitor who had come to Bournemouth specially to see him, to find himself put to the door, either on the ground of having a cold, to the contagion of which it was unsafe for Stevenson to be exposed, or because his host was already ...”