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“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police devoted far more ...”

“... inside flap of the jacket, the publishers were giving away too many clues. The drawing showed the young man whom Mr Pennington describes in his Introduction as having the ‘slight irregularity of face that women find handsome, especially when matched with blond hair and blue eyes’. The photograph of Mr Pennington revealed a dark-bearded, middle-aged man ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... and many legal theorists believe it is. A literate Martian, for example, would not believe that Michael Zander was writing about the same society as Paddy Hillyard and Janie Percy-Smith, and at the same period of time. There is simply no space in Zander’s world-picture for the possibility that ours is a coercive state or that democracy is in decline here ...”

“... In First Among Equals, Jeffrey Archer introduces a Labour MP who is likewise endangered by a young black girl ‘in a white leather mini skirt so short it might have been better described as a handkerchief’. But, unlike D.M. Thomas, both Raven and Archer are accomplished storytellers, keen on verisimilitude. Both are skilled in the use of stock ...”

“... Charles Tennyson depicted, for the first time, the gothic excesses of the Somersby rectory where young Alfred grew up: the alcoholism, madness and opium addiction. Under this family regime of ‘black-bloodedness’ (a term which Charles Tennyson popularised) ‘the boyish self-confidence disappeared and Alfred became subject to those moods of self-torment ...”

“... lasting significance than anything he achieved in power. Oswald Mosley, the most impressive of the Young Turks to contest MacDonald, lurched into even deeper disgrace, while Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury were simply not memorable. Clement Attlee, the leader for twenty years and the man who led Labour to the new Jerusalem of 1945, was, in the event, the ...”

“... whom he described as the first ‘good woman’ he had known, though he soon left her and their young daughter for the journalist and actress Rose Caylor. They married in 1926 and remained together until his death in 1964.At the end of the First World War, Hecht was sent to Europe as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He saw in Germany, he later ...”

“... Few previous far-right jamborees had boasted such a deep roster of senior British politicians: Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the ...”

“... she was being literal as well as figurative. A pen was what she wrote with. Dan Jacobson’s and Michael Frayn’s reliance on, respectively, a word processor and a tape recorder needn’t be put down to Post-Modern self-consciousness. Novels naturally like to keep up with the technology on which they rely, but an appeal – however disingenuous – to ...”

“... in the prison. Of Brian Sharp they declared bluntly: ‘We do not believe him.’ Joyce Lynass, a young mother and church worker, had been a police cadet when the men were brought to Queen’s Road Police Station in 1974. She said in her original evidence at the Court of Appeal that she had seen no assault or ill-treatment of the men in prison. She was then ...”

“... replacing public funding for orphanages. Not long after £200,000 had been spent in convincing the young London male on his way to the wine bar that philistinism is smart and Saatchi and Saatchi are brilliant, the Director was scanning the budget for £300,000 – the sum needed for redundancy payments which would enable her to get rid of some of the senior ...”

“... When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family. Avowedly happier with the lives of others than with his own, he remains as close as the circumstance permits to the condition of invisible watcher ...”

“... suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting. In 1993, Michael Mates left the government after disclosures that he had sent gifts and messages of support to the businessman Asil Nadir. Norman Lamont caused an uproar over his use of public money to evict a tenant from his property. Other lesser Tories, such as Mrs ...”