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“... his part Lebed asked his followers to vote for Yeltsin. The ploy worked: on 3 July Yeltsin was the victor, with 54 per cent of the vote. Three months later, Lebed was dismissed and has since sunk into obscurity. In the middle of the elections Yeltsin had a major heart attack. Later in the year he had a quintuple bypass operation. He dealt with this crisis by ...”

“... Scottish headmaster tells how he ‘escaped from the nightmare of Catterick to a commission in the Gordon Highlanders’, but while he was a Catterick ranker he thought the officers ‘shallow and frivolous men, content to leave their soldiers and their troops and squadrons to the mercy of the uncertain tempers of the NCOs’. We liked our troop officer, a ...”

“... the fall of 1941, even if freed of the rather minor British distraction. No matter – whoever the victor, he would certainly have become the unchallenged master of continental Europe. That in turn would have left Britain perfectly isolated and entirely dependent on Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, as the case might be, for any access at all to ...”

“... Tan Fantasy’, can be interpreted as an inspiring racial statement (the best recording is the RCA Victor version, made on 26 October 1927; three other similar versions were recorded on different labels in the same month). The ‘Tan’ of the title refers to light complexions, long deemed a social advantage to African-Americans, starting with candidates for ...”

“... Thomson, benign among proprietors, has come and gone, picking up a peerage in the process. So has Victor Matthews, moving from building-site to Fleet Street and out again in less than ten years. The free or cut-price offers of dictionaries and flower-pots in the 1930s have given way to bingo and cash prizes. As for content, most of the popular papers are as ...”

“... point. And they give the same pair of examples. It’s true that Wilson once attacked the Tory victor in Smethwick in 1964 for letting his canvassers say that if you wanted ‘a nigger neighbour, vote Labour’. And it’s true that he became annoyed when Ian Smith kept Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole in a boiling police van, without food or ...”

“... ignoble at all. And today, 15 June, comes George Bush paying a courtesy call on the Queen and Gordon Brown before having a cheering conscience-free get-together with his old mate Tony Blair. And here are the helicopters flying over Regent’s Park to prove it. 26 June, Espiessac. I sit in the wicker rocking-chair in the shade of the willow by the ...”

“... common decency of his father, Lionel, a leading banker and industrialist whose own father had been Gordon Selfridge’s butler. Robert seemed a thorough aristo to his friends in the pop music world, but his nobbier chums looked down on him a bit. John Richardson says: One of the odd things about Robert was that he always dressed up. The rest of us were in ...”

“... on many people. Sisman tells the story of a sad, alcoholic ‘upper-class remittance man’ called Gordon Hobson, who attached himself to Ronnie ‘like a lost dog’. ‘I hope your father knows what he’s doing,’ he told David, ‘because he’s had all my money!’ All the money disappeared, and Hobson killed himself. Ronnie’s first wife, Olive, was ...”

“... there is but one tense, and all ages in her sight are alike present,’ he asserted in a review of Victor Hugo’s L’Année terrible, and this must have been one source of T.S. Eliot’s idea of artistic tradition – and modernist technique – as a ‘simultaneous present’. In ‘On the Cliffs’ (1880), Swinburne experimented with blending quotations ...”

“... on the postwar ‘malling’ of suburban and urban space, from the first godfather of the mall, Victor Gruen, to the current one, Jon Jerde. The key inventions here are air-conditioning, which opened up vast interiors to buying and selling, and the escalator, which allowed shoppers to traverse these new expanses with distracted ease. Together they have made ...”

“... he went on to see some of the other great modernist works of the North-East. He got to climb on Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee (‘From that moment on,’ after scraping his knees on the pavilion’s rough surfaces, ‘I fell in love with raw concrete’), and he got to gaze longingly at the Trinity Square Car Park and the Dunston ...”

“... to review how the gambling industry in Britain had come to be organised. It was chaired by Victor Rothschild and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised ...”

“... always a terrible sign. In September 2008, the Big Four bank Lloyds bought HBOS, after its boss, Victor Blank – this is the part you couldn’t make up – bumped into Gordon Brown at a drinks party and got him to give an assurance that a takeover would not be referred to the monopolies commission. Most of us have had a ...”