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“... Latin has always suffered from being in the shadow of its more glamorous Greek cousin. It is rarely allowed to stay up late for Dionysiac frenzies, sympotic sensuality or the frenetic cut and thrust of argument; instead, it has languished in the schoolroom, surrounded in popular mythology by a stuffy atmosphere of grammar, empire and conservative values ...”

“... two books is for a minister of culture. Norman St John-Stevas was Minister for the Arts and a cabinet minister, but the duality was, like a seat on the Arts Council, personal to him. When Mrs Thatcher sacked him, the minister for the arts resumed the status of a junior minister at the Department of Education and Science, presiding over his own ...”

“... had been created to which the secretaries of state for the three services, who were not in the Cabinet, were subordinate. It was probably as far as Profumo would have ever got. Though ambitious, he was not a political heavyweight. Yet he was an energetic and capable minister at the War Office, and all was going well until in July 1961 he and Valerie spent ...”

“... Dyson’s Case more than a century ago: ‘If ministerial responsibility were more than the mere shadow of a name, the matter would be less important, but as it is, the courts are the only defence of the liberty of the subject against departmental aggression.’Despite Lord Reed’s astute reasoning my vote would have gone with the majority on the ground I ...”

“... qualities of film than to the stories it told. She writes of watching, during a screening of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, a dark shadow that appeared ‘like a tadpole’ at the corner of the screen, then ‘swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity’. The ...”

“... the act and on the European Convention on Human Rights which it patriates has scared ministers and shadow ministers alike into blaming the act for everything that goes wrong in the justice system. The Sun’s casual description of it (in a news story) as ‘the hated law which frees murderers to kill again’ has been internalised by the political culture to a ...”

“... benches soon learnt not to be deceived. When Harold Macmillan callously cleared out a third of his Cabinet in ‘the night of the long knives’ of July 1962, it was Thorpe who caused the Prime Minister to squirm by gravely rising to his feet and intoning in his deep, splendid, actor’s voice: ‘Greater love hath no man than this – that he will lay down ...”

“... figure, gets old and ready to retire. Notice of his intentions concentrates the minds of his Cabinet wonderfully. Its members pass up shop-floor unrest in favour of jockeying for succession. Peccadilloes bulk large in fiction about government. And scandal becomes a standard metaphorical device, a kind of shorthand whereby bankruptcy in public life is ...”

“... speech outside Number Ten on 7 July, his sole political resignation had been from Theresa May’s cabinet in 2018, the opening gambit in his successful campaign to take her job. In 2004, when his lies about his affair with Petronella Wyatt and her subsequent abortion were exposed, he refused Michael Howard’s order that he resign as a ...”

“... thought that the removal of Kenneth Clarke, Dominic Grieve and (perhaps) William Hague from the cabinet left the field clear for his long promised assault on human rights law. Instead, he lost any respectable cover for the Conservative Party’s sinister and absurdly ill-conceived proposals, which were published alongside his personal announcement of them ...”

“... radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he couldn’t catch his glittering eye. There is only one passage in Powell’s Birmingham speech that I had quite forgotten, still a ...”

“... External Affairs, Chief Tom Ikimi, was shortly to put it, who the hell was Canada anyway? In the Shadow of a Saint is Ken Wiwa’s attempt to come to terms with the events surrounding his father’s death, but he is handicapped by his uneasy relationship with a country that gave him the sense of a ‘barbaric system sitting on top of people, dehumanising ...”

“... of indignant energy has fired the reviews of this book, many of them by Mrs Thatcher’s former Cabinet colleagues, largely because of the sheer outrageousness of those claims to frankness and humility. And there has, of course, been no difficulty in showing that, in these memoirs as in her career, Thatcher has been neither frank nor humble. Mrs Thatcher ...”

“... for Rhondda since 2001, he is a former deputy leader of the House of Commons and, until becoming shadow minister for culture, was chair of the Committees on Standards and Privileges. He has written an account of Christian Socialism, biographies of Stafford Cripps and – strange conjunction – Glenda Jackson, a two-volume ‘biography’ of Parliament, a ...”

“... of a novel. Most of the contributors were in their twenties in the Sixties; one is a former Cabinet Minister now in her seventies; the last entry is by two sisters in their teens. The women come from five continents: some are black, one is Irish, one Greek, one Australian. They include a film star, a jazz singer, several writers of different sorts, a ...”