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“... whippets, dovecot in the stable court, enclosed formal garden, nearby convent, tapestries of the hunt in the dining-room, whole logs burning in huge fireplaces, and meals of meat, wine, fruit and cake. When Hawkes speaks of the sun on the golden stone of the house or describes the clatter of horses’ hooves on the cobbles, he is constructing a fantasy that ...”

“... journals and letters and papers came to light and were published, in that long treasure-hunt which began in 1927 at Malahide in Ireland, so most of the disparaging myths about him progressively fell away. After his death in 1795, it was said that he was so effectively locked out of good society after the publication of the Life of Johnson ...”

“... lost large sums at Aspinalls – playing backgammon, not roulette. He was posher, by far, than Margaret Thatcher and most of the cowed arrivistes in her Cabinet. And, to cap it all, he’d written several books (both fiction and non-fiction). He had claims to be thought of as an intellectual. Who else, in Thatcher’s Parliament, could say the ...”

“... him as the ‘first and the finest’ of all the heroes of the Golden Age of Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher had a penchant for ‘swashbuckling’ entrepreneurs, especially ones with Northern accents. When she first met James Hanson, his gentle Yorkshire lilt fascinated her almost as much as his millions. She assumed, as Harold Wilson had several ...”

“... Mell Gap. The survey dates the removal of these buildings to the 1770s. A pictorial map drawn by Margaret Weld in 1731 shows village life going on within the walls of the seigneury: an ideal aristocratic prospect, to be sure, but one that also harboured a harmonious village Utopia. This vision of sublime integration would be sadly disappointed by the putting ...”

“... others choose for their own good reasons to give you or leave you in their wills. Years before Margaret Thatcher made it a political mantra, Nozick taught his followers to say ‘there is no such thing as society,’ and no social obligation to see that needs are taken care of or that inequality does not get out of hand. These points had been made ...”

“... experiences of the First World War, was one of which writers were acutely aware. In 1926, Violet Hunt, who began to publish in the 1890s, described herself as the kind of New Woman people used to write about long ago, and her friend Rebecca West, who joined the staff of the Freewoman in 1911, as a prototype of the ‘Newest Woman’. The gap opens within The ...”

“... a young man he danced four nights running at Holyrood Palace with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, something he says he had ‘entirely forgotten’ until he found in his papers a ‘Dear Ludo’ letter from Princess Elizabeth thanking him for his wedding present. (Old men forget, but this is forgetfulness indeed!) He is on amiable terms with ...”

“... jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. She is half-smiling, looking off to the left. Emma’s mother, Margaret Caldwell, thinks her husband, Willie, took the picture. Her daughter was, she says, determined to get off heroin, an addiction which began after her older sister died of cancer and which forced her onto ‘the drag’, the red-light streets just west of ...”

“... ministerial proponents, besides Salisbury, were Stanley Baldwin (1923-24, 1924-29, 1935-37) and Margaret Thatcher (1979-90), who shared his knack for condensing a political philosophy into a simple (and simplifying) phrase, as well as his ability rhetorically to align the interests of the nation with the interests of capital. It’s still possible to detect ...”

“... from folklore, the Bible, product branding, Halloween parties and newspaper cartoons. The ‘witch hunt’ is an over-used metaphor – from Arthur Miller’s skewering of McCarthyism in The Crucible to Trump’s self-righteous tweets. Devotees of Wicca also call themselves witches. In fiction and legend, witches can be white or black, good or bad: they can be ...”

“... to Members’ Allowances, it’s not surprising that most MPs seem to have followed the example of Margaret Beckett, who confessed: ‘I just grabbed together the relevant things and bunged them into the Fees Office and left it to them to sort it out.’ So Gerald Kaufman, having spent £8865 on a Bang & Olufsen 40” BeoVision LCD TV, described by its ...”

“... to Frederick in 1613, the 16-year-old Elizabeth was observed by German courtiers returning from a hunt, crossbow in hand, having ‘chased the deer after such a fashion that it was marvelled at and in this country even seemed somewhat strange’. Hunting was a family passion. According to his biographer Brennan Pursell, persistence was one of Frederick’s ...”

“... of unreason. Was Major perhaps similarly touched? He seemed not to be, but who could tell? The hunt was on for something non-grey in the grey man’s genealogy: a bad apple on the Major family tree, an errant gene, a skeleton in one of those long-ago suburban cupboards. And straightaway there seemed to be rich pickings. This nobody from nowhere turned out ...”

“... is liable to be dispelled. But when the stage is set correctly, the illusion can be very powerful. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair oversaw devastating electoral machines, which delivered four huge parliamentary majorities in the space of twenty years. Both appeared to establish a new consensus as to what constituted good leadership and policy. The fact that ...”