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“... willing to read as ‘anal’) sink into the slime, the film goes down the drain. Vera Miles and John Gavin, pale shadows of Leigh and Perkins, stand around fretfully or rush about enthusiastically like a budget version of the Famous Five, saying and being nothing very interesting; awkward puppets, whose job it is to edge the audience to more anxiety before ...”

“... intelligence ‘the perfect pattern of an eminent prelate of the Catholic Church’, to D’arcy Osborne, the British government’s representative in Rome during World War Two, who, though often critical of Pacelli’s actions – and inaction – thought him the saintliest man he had ever met, and wished that he was Catholic so that he could receive ...”

“... extra £9.8 to £16.4 billion, less than changes made to the tax system by Gordon Brown and George Osborne. Andy Stern suggests a form of UBI giving every American adult $1000 a month, at a cost of $2.7 trillion, to be paid for by getting rid of existing programmes, cutting tax breaks (which cost $1.2 trillion), reducing defence spending and instituting a ...”

“... a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a perception of the activities of the levelling Labour governments which have come and gone since 1945. But there’s more of that in the second of the books than there is in the ...”

“... spend it on goods and services. The Office of Budget Responsibility is the body set up by George Osborne in response to the fact that people had stopped believing official Treasury pronouncements. In their response to last year’s budget, the OBR included a modest boost to ‘household consumption growth’, i.e. people spending money, thanks to the effect ...”

“... suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political lexicon’ in 1980 via the Lancashire Tory MP John Lee, who announced that ‘those of us who represent the regions are increasingly aware of the North-South divide, as 21st-century industry is increasingly sucked towards the South-East.’ The phrase first appeared in Hansard a few months earlier, used by ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... but altogether more accurate description of what was going on was provided by George Osborne on Question Time, who accused Brown of ‘playing politics with the political process’. That’s exactly what he was doing, which is why when he got the politics wrong the whole thing blew up in his face. So the extensive alterations to Britain’s ...”

“... Gear, were the only ones among her critics who got her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the head ...”

“... taken up by a handful of Tory MPs with established reputations as reactionary clowns – Sir Cyril Osborne, Sir Gerald Nabarro, Ronald Bell, Sir Tufton Beamish and so on. The 1962 Immigration Act cut the flow of immigrants from over 100,000 a year to around 70,000, but it took the shock of the 1964 Smethwick result to make Labour reduce that number to 50,000 a ...”

“... Koh-i-Noor diamond, all aroused Victoria’s keen interest. He soon became a regular visitor to Osborne and Windsor and an intimate member of the Royal Family circle. Victoria wanted him to marry her Indian princess godchild, Victoria Gouramma, daughter of the deposed Raja of Coorg, but Duleep confessed his desire to obtain an English wife. The flirtatious ...”

“... decision could be managed politically – something that must haunt Cameron and George Osborne, for all the latter’s daily attempts in the Evening Standard to peddle the idea that this is ‘May’s Brexit crisis’.There is indeed a crisis, but it’s not unmanageable. In late March, Parliament voted to ‘take control’, in the hope of finding ...”

“... of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by condescending arts programmers ...”

“... London – to which superstar American CEOs were lured with the promise of an audience with Elton John and the king in St Paul’s Cathedral (proof, apparently, that Britain is ‘open for business’, or more plausibly that desperate times call for desperate measures) – Starmer switched to a clumsier metaphor. ‘We are in the business of building on our ...”

“... democrats – Blair, but also Clinton, Lagarde, Schröder, Hollande, Rajoy, Renzi, Cameron and Osborne – are continually caught in the revolving door between business and politics. He doesn’t mention either that it was Obama who, as Moyn has put it, ‘enhanced the powers of a presidency, which is now in the hands of a charlatan’, or that in his ...”