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“... defeated party became less indulgent of heterodoxy. It was strikingly obvious to outsiders that Kenneth Clarke, an experienced former cabinet minister with an instinctive and easy blokeishness, would be a formidable force as leader of the opposition. Yet the Conservative Party declined to elect him on account of his Europhile perversities. And – worse ...”

“... what would have happened if the Conservatives had, as at one moment they could have, united behind Kenneth Clarke and accepted whatever Clarke’s terms might have been for leading them? Of Clarke, my personal impressions are of a presence no less solid and forceful than my personal impressions of Brown. I had dealings with Clarke twice – once when he was ...”

“... when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise wasn’t the downfall of May’s advisers so much as their earlier rise to brief but utter dominance in a party whose upper reaches have in recent times seemed to belong almost exclusively to Old Etonians. Hill was born in ...”

“... played in the establishment of BBC television’s reportorial and documentary conventions. Kenneth Allsop, Fyfe Robertson, James Cameron, Trevor Philpot, Robert Kee and Slim Hewitt (‘the scourge of Nuneaton’), all worked for it. The roles of writer, photographer and even picture editor often ...”

“... many recent bad news stories about the NHS, its significance underscored by the fact that David Cameron felt it necessary to present the report to the House of the Commons himself, rather than leave it to the secretary of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the ...”

“... Other potential methods of reducing the cost of the criminal system found no political favour. Kenneth Clarke, who was lord chancellor at the time, sought to reduce the length of sentences for serious crimes; David Cameron publicly overruled him. So, despite representing less than half the legal aid budget, civil claims ...”

“... later, Thatcher gave her support to Iain Duncan-Smith, helping him to see off Michael Portillo and Kenneth Clarke. When Duncan-Smith proved even less successful than his predecessor, he was replaced by another Thatcherite, Michael Howard, who went down to defeat against Blair in 2005. In truth, it was Blair himself who most appreciated her blessing. When she ...”

“... was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious. Crowe’s scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and doodled ballpoint stars meant to ward off evil influences. Bowie revealed an enthusiasm for Aleister Crowley’s system of ceremonial magick that ...”

“... NHS with private ones, the effect concealed by large spending increases, long before Lansley and Cameron took charge. If the Conservatives and their Liberal allies are dismantling the NHS, it was Labour that loosened the screws. The first attempt to introduce market competition into the NHS was made by Kenneth Clarke in ...”

“... Scrutiny Committee on 18 January 2018.‘That sounds like a lot of money,’ the Washington lawyer Kenneth Feinberg said when I called him, ‘but it’s not really.’ Feinberg was the formal administrator of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, and he did the same job after the Boston Marathon bombing and after the mass shooting at a cinema in ...”