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“... had swallowed the Free Trade orthodoxy, as established under Peel, and subscribed to the cross-party fiscal consensus. Suddenly all this was challenged by Joseph Chamberlain. His policy of TariffReform was aptly called a crusade. Built around his charismatic leadership and amplified by every trick of the media, it imported a strident ideological note ...”

“... During 2005, while Nigel Cliff was writing his wonderful book about the Astor Place riot, I too visited a couple of the archives he consulted, namely the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the New York Historical Society. Long fascinated by the events of 10 May 1849, I couldn’t leave Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to Astor Place ...”

“... a guarantee, a political undertaking unenforceable in law, which just happened to work during the cross-border Labour ascendancy of the Blair era. It’s perfectly possible that as powers return from Europe to the UK, the competencies of the Scottish Parliament will be circumscribed without consultation. In Northern Ireland Brexit compromises the architecture ...”

“... historical characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy ...”

“... couldn’t be an apparatchik who would simply rehearse the official credo. The MEP we hit on was Nigel Farage, chairman of the United Kingdom Independence Party. Although he was a City metal futures trader rather than a professional politician, he could walk and talk polished sound-bites at the same time. Best of all, and in sharp contrast to other potential ...”

“... eyes, comfortable and predatory. He seems poised between repletion and dyspepsia, like a bewigged Nigel Lawson, arrested for all time at the moment of incipient eructation. James Winn says: ‘His short, squat figure later led his enemies to call him “Poet Squab”, and the plump birdlike face in this picture justifies the nickname.’ When Rochester, about ...”

“... an equivalent rise, bringing him to £ 1.3m a year. Kingfisher’s committee was chaired by Sir Nigel Mobbs of Slough Estates, whose own remuneration committee decided that, after a bad year, Sir Nigel was the only executive who deserved a rise at all – his pay went up to £312,000. Slough Estates’ remuneration ...”

“... in both the US and the UK. To Mrs Thatcher’s horror, it seemed possible that he would be cross-examined about the al-Yamamah deal and asked to explain how exactly he’d made £12 million out of it. Worse still, an American former business associate was suing him for allegedly ‘hijacking’ his company, a case which involved Thatcher family ...”

“... in the Dock recapitulates elements of both, and of the work that undergirds the whole project, Nigel Walker’s Crime and Insanity in England, Vol. I (1968). Although it breaks less fresh ground than its predecessors, its focus on diagnosis propels it to the heart of the matter. As he puts it in his preface, after thirty years scrutinising the Session ...”

“... constant tease of Answered Prayers – that promised concoction which will be half Proust, half Nigel Dempster – but in the meantime a new aesthetic was getting overdue. The Preface to Music for Chameleons, reprinted from Vogue, provides it. It opens with some routine bravado – ‘Writers, at least those who take genuine risks, who are willing to bite ...”

“... for). John had a marvellously dry sense of humour and always a pithy comment, ever an academic. Nigel Bell John and I had worked together, off and on, for I suppose more than twenty years both at the TLS and the LRB and I grew to admire him hugely for his learning, wit and humour. First I was his editor and then he was my editor and I enjoyed both ...”

“... the house like a granite architrave. English readers are already familiar with Thomas the Bad from Nigel Hamilton’s The Brothers Mann. With an ironic mock-generosity worthy of Thomas himself, Golo Mann attributes his father’s awfulness to the struggle of conscience he went through in writing his later bitterly-regretted affirmation of German nationalism in ...”

“... and the grand to be taken seriously by the literary establishment’. According to Enoch Powell, Nigel Birch deserves to be ‘remembered for his insistence on retaining the trees in Park Lane when it was widened’. Sometimes the choice of contributors can seem cosier than it might have been: Ned Sherrin on Caryl Brahms, for example, or Hugh Johnson on his ...”

“... Thing comes out: bright green, furry, long-legged … The size of a dinner plate, and very cross. It’s Mummy. I stamp. Squelch. Yuk.’ His nanny used to follow marching guardsmen when she took him out in his pram; later she introduced him to war comics and boys’ adventure stories. ‘What Nanny didn’t tell me was that these books were for ...”

“... formal absorption better captured than in the 1993 documentary film about Bourgeois directed by Nigel Finch for Arena Films. It is in fact a collaborative performance piece staged by Bourgeois and the director which successfully enacts the antagonism between interviewer and interviewee characteristic of Bourgeois’s encounters with the investigative ...”