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“... Trapnel remarks at the beginning of a long monologue on the art of biography. Placed beside Paul Willetts’s oddly spiritless biography, Powell’s portrait seems remarkable. ‘I’m a master of disguise,’ Ross once boasted to a friend, after delightedly – and wrongly – spotting a version of himself in one of Iris Murdoch’s early ...”

“... halting of a car at the junctions on that homely uncompromising grid. Outside the shops, my friend Paul, Bogside-born, says Look at the floor: the pavement’s overlaid solid with pale-coral, ivory, dove-grey chewing-gum. Welcome to the city of the grinding jaw. Behind us a watchtower bristles, stuck thick as an African nail-fetish head with suspicious ...”

“... we see him standing at the bar of the Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place, dressed, as his biographer Paul Willetts writes, ‘in either a camel-hair coat or an astrakhan-collared alternative, together with a pale suit and a brightly patterned tie, augmented by a cane, cigarette-holder, snuff box and dark glasses’, a slave to hard booze and ...”

“... supervised by the Tory Whips office, in particular by two young MPs, David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts and Andrew Mitchell, whose father, David Mitchell, is also a Tory MP, and once chose Neil Hamilton to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary. The Guardian had told a bit of the story. Parliament had uncovered none of it. And that might have been an end ...”

“... the poll tax; or that the policy editor of Newsnight, Chris Cook, used to be an adviser to David Willetts; or that Nick Robinson, shortly to replace James Naughtie on Today, was once president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Doubtless most of the time these men do a bang-up job, suspending their personal beliefs in the service of ...”

“... a title, sometimes claims to be less posh than Cameron on the grounds that his public school, St Paul’s, is in London, and he didn’t board. Both sowed the seeds of tabloid merriment by joining a ludicrous club for rich boys while at Oxford, and even Cameron’s much advertised fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers ...”