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“... prefigured where the swing to Labour would be greatest, even those constituencies, like Bristol West (William Waldegrave’s seat), where Labour would come from third place to win. Why were we so ready to discount this overwhelming weight of evidence? The obvious answer is 1992 – once bitten twice shy. That is a good reason; but there are, I think, two ...”

“... and G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could just as usefully have been a lot shorter. Nigel Smith is fascinating on ‘The uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’ and Peter Burke’s little sketch of post-Medieval uses of Latin is wide-ranging and excellent. Other chapters suffer from being wide-ranging and bad. Victor Kiernan’s ‘Languages ...”

“... queer. He’d lived first in the London Terrace complex in Chelsea, then down at the bottom of the West Village, on Charlton Street, off Sixth Avenue. Over the years, I’d visit him and we’d get high, go out to dinner, goof around. It was always a thrill for me, a season’s highlight. He knew how to have fun, like a big kid with a fat wallet: a ...”

“... my grandfather, had claim to be Scottish, despite their London upbringing. Their parents were West Coast Scots who settled in England at the beginning of the 20th century. The brothers’ move to British India – Robin to be assistant manager on the tea plantation, Jack to work on the electrification of Madras – was in some ways a flight from bad times ...”

“... from these and their predecessors that the Americans have drawn for the last seven years. In 1997, Nigel Rodley, then the UN special rapporteur on torture, very specifically reaffirmed his condemnation of these methods as torture: Each of these measures on its own may not provoke severe pain or suffering. Together – and they are frequently used in ...”

“... names like Honeyhanger, Honey Hill, Stoatley Rough, Coneybury, Coneyhurst on the Hill. In south-west Surrey there prospered dozens of related associations bound by false memories of delving Adam and spinning Eve, a fervid enthusiasm for looking backwards and Luddism – which comes easy when you have electricity, gas and a motor home to protect the Napier ...”

“... of Wind in the Willows is to be revived for two weeks in August, the revival to be supervised by a Nigel Nicholson. Mole and Ratty as Harold and Vita now (and Violet Trefusis as Mr Toad). 29 July, Ménerbes. Stripping some redcurrants this evening reminds me how when I was writing both Getting On and The Old Country I could never think of something for the ...”

“... I left it out.’ A self-séance. A summoning of dead voices. My appointment with Marks was in a West Brompton flat, a few streets from his old place in Cathcart Road, and well within crawling distance of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a ...”

“... is running down: typewriters break and no one can fix them, mines and smelters lie idle, and out West, in an image experienced as the ultimate horror, a farmer is spotted using a plough. Men of talent, composers, industrialists, financiers, one by one destroy their businesses and disappear. Faceless governments pass progressively more anti-business ...”

“... triumphant speech in the early hours of the morning when the referendum count was nearly complete, Nigel Farage concluded: ‘Let June the 23rd go down in our history as our independence day!’ The phrasing and the cadence told you that he wasn’t referring to India or America’s annual celebration of their freedom from imperial Britain. How could he be? He ...”

“... held their breath and made a wide circuit. Terrible ghosts were trapped in the ground. On the west of the peninsula, now captured by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, was once the Execution Dock. The gallows and iron cage moved here from Wapping, when the sensibilities of that district, much closer to civilisation, were elevated by the mansions of ...”

“... has ‘cultural pluralism’ weakened the appetite for suppression among the mixed cultures of the West.A few sticking points remain, even for the most liberal-minded technocrats: the legality of circulating child pornography, for example, or of denying the facts of the Holocaust. In the first case, the clear offence is that children cannot know the meaning of ...”

“... with a pronounced and visible capacity to be publicly enraged or publicly amused (it is Nigel Farage’s distinction to appear forever angry and amused at the same time) have been central to politics in the last decade, and to the ‘populist’ upheavals that have afflicted liberal democracies. The continually enraged or amused political leader ...”

“... the discussions. ‘Does anyone imagine that Mr Gorbachev would be prepared to talk at all if the West had already disarmed?’ she asked her audience, entirely confident of the answer. But in the event something unexpected happened. Though she liked Reagan and was readily charmed by him, Thatcher had always been a little suspicious of his occasional flights ...”

“... Vienna in 1959, beating even Natalia Makarova, the queen of swans. It was his first visit to the West, and Russian émigrés were lying in wait for the Soviet dancers, throwing copies of Doctor Zhivago through the bus windows when they arrived. Already, Nureyev had a reputation as a difficult character, often absconding from the group and refusing to sing ...”