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“... birds with names like Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo. When Barry Humphries squawked the other day that he had been pleased to find that Canberra had become a little ‘sleazy’, he was joking. Out of this garden city of good government, on 22 June 1983, flew a telex which read: ‘There appears to be no action which the Australian Federal Police can take ...”

“... and from Infectious to Recovered. These formulae tell us how many people to subtract each day from the Susceptible population and add to the Infectious, and how many to subtract from the Infectious and add to the Recovered. The number of people moved out of the Susceptible group is calculated from the average number of contacts each individual ...”

“... made it. She won a Sunday Referee poetry prize (‘one of the most exquisite word artists of our day’, the adjudication raved), and began to be taken up, and to move in the demi-monde of the arts, meeting writers and painters. There was a ‘tremendous blurb’ about her in the Referee: at a party afterwards she ‘was ghastly embarrassed and nearly went ...”

“... give me a plot. And it works.’ Though sometimes God is not immediately obliging. ‘The other day He was a bit slow; I thought perhaps He is bored with me. I asked my secretaries, bring me up all my research on the Restoration ... you know, George V ... and as it was coming, a voice said, absolutely clearly: “Panama Canal.” I knew nothing about the ...”

“... books on such subjects as chemical and biological weapons (with Jeremy Paxman), the Falklands War, Neil Kinnock, the Hitler Diaries and Bernard Ingham. A good friend of Peter Mandelson’s, he has long been close to the inner circles of New Labour. As well as there having been no pesky research to slow down the writing of the novel, there was also a strong ...”

“... tolerated. If a pretender to the premiership boasts of having drunk, in his youth, 14 pints in one day, or the current Prime Minister’s son is found paralytic in Leicester Square after downing many pints, it is seen as a manly rite of passage. Beer Street is as wholesomely British as it was in Hogarth’s day (not so Drug ...”

“... Iwas​ still half asleep when I heard the story on an early morning TV show one day in April. It was so odd I wondered later if I had dreamed it. But it was true: government authorities in Chechnya had imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast ...”

“... by the big battalions of the old parties. Survival rather than advance would be the order of the day. But, perversely, a full five-year Parliament has been a blessing. The transition to the final, electioneering phase is occurring with three-and-a-half years gone (the average life of a peacetime Parliament). It is also occurring as the SDP completes its own ...”

“... could manage a reply. Industrialists, bankers, rich Tories of every description felt that the day of doom was nigh. John Davies, Secretary of State for Industry in the Tory Government and a former Director-General of the CBI, called his children round the hearth to tell them this was the last Christmas of its kind they would be enjoying together. Tony ...”

“... divil Paisley’. Ten years ago, I lugged a video recorder round to her flat so she could watch Neil Jordan’s biopic about the nationalist politician and guerrilla Michael Collins. In the closing sequence, Collins’s fiancée, Kitty, buys her wedding dress, Michael is assassinated by anti-Treatyites in the wilds of County Cork, and Sinead O’Connor ...”

“... was born. Before the 1992 election, it seemed like everything was about to change for the better. Neil Kinnock would be prime minister and football would reclaim its place at the centre of national life. Then John Major won, and two months later England were dumped out of Euro ’92 by Sweden. The Sun put the England manager, Graham Taylor, on the back page ...”

“... and most intensive (and enjoyable) of my ten Parliamentary contests. But long before Polling Day I realised that the national campaign had not acquired the momentum essential to a breakthrough. Only a single party with a single leadership could compete successfully and win public confidence. At the time of the Limehouse Declaration, there were no ...”

“... courts, with a horrible aggrieved solicitor to the fore. And then at Hillsborough the other day a mass of Liverpool fans arrived late at the turnstiles with the emptying of the pubs, and struggled to be let in. A gate was opened for safety’s sake, and they rushed, undirected, into the ground, causing more deaths. Blame was heaped on the Police, and ...”

“... Tree Duck are so familiar that I suspect it’s actually a work of non-fiction. So if you thought Neil Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie was the final, National-Book-Award-winning word on what happened in Vietnam, wait until you meet C.W. Sughrue and Millard Fillmore, a goose. James Crumley’s other detective novels, The Last Good Kiss, The Wrong Case and ...”

“... Engel reminds us of the sheer scale of Parliamentary coverage in earlier newspapers. On a single day in 1855, the Times carried 61,500 words of Parliamentary debate verbatim, considerably more than half the length of Engel’s book. These days, three thousand words of Parliamentary report is a great deal. The rest of what is said is spoken, for all practical ...”