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“... was equality officer, drafted the letter for her. She was up against a popular sitting MP, Ernie Roberts, as well as the leader of the local council, who had been all but anointed his eventual successor. Abbott spoke last at the selection meeting, aware that no one in the room thought she could win. Her speech began with her Uncle Charlie in Jamaica and ...”

“... for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was ...”

“... of ‘confluence’, or as a place name, is in the title of a print after Thomas Sautelle Roberts showing the meeting of the waters that is the subject of Moore’s song. It was published in 1804, and is the only evidence I have that the confluence of the Avonmore and Avonbeg was called the Meeting of the Waters before the song was ...”

“... Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the state is on ...”

“... books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney – on the train to Edinburgh, the city where the nerve-wracked composer, on his way to insanity and death, was hospitalised after being gassed in 1917. I stared at the few surviving pictures of ...”

“... were growing up, the only old framed photograph my brothers and I ever saw was of my grandfather Michael, a hero of the Second World War. And that’s always the way he was described to us, a war hero, the man who tried to save his Glasgow compatriots on HMS Forfar when it was struck by two torpedoes in December 1940. Except that story wasn’t true ...”