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“... any British feeling of superiority in this regard. ‘Where is such habitual temperance?’ Whitelaw Ainslie asked in 1835. ‘In England? No!’) Despite this, cannabis had a fearsome reputation, equal to that of opium. William Caine, an 1890s abolitionist MP quoted by James Mills, claimed it was the ‘most horrible ...”

“... best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord Rothschild. They were much clearer about what they ...”

“... physicians were hoarding medical lore more advanced than the West’s. In the 1780s, Sir William Jones, the great Sanskrit scholar, had included medical remedies among some of the very earliest translations he made from the ancient Indian classics. Over the following decades, large numbers of Indian pharmacopoeia were collected and published. In the ...”

“... In the early Seventies the only minister who had any responsibility for this area was Lord Whitelaw, who, in his capacity as Lord Privy Seal, was supposed to have the time to muse upon future policies in his bath. Hence the early warning system became known as ‘Mr Whitelaw’s bath’. Alas, the Treasury took the ...”

“... admirer of Zola and a writer for New York’s Evening Sun. They were in the studio of the painter William Dallgren, who was painting a portrait of Davies (maybe). Out with Davies! Out with Dallgren! Out with the bit of tooth Crane lost in a fistfight at 17 after he described a Tennyson poem as swill! Banishing Beer brings some sad losses but Sorrentino sticks ...”

“... in the book, is virtually a history of the Heath Government of 1970-4, with chapters like ‘Whitelaw in Ulster’ which are hardly biographical in the strict sense. Part Five on Heath’s fall, is virtually an epilogue, Part Six a codicil, showing how he denied any political legacy to his appointed successor. All told – and it is – this is surely ...”

“... released so that the RAF could fly him to London for talks at a house in Cheyne Walk with Willie Whitelaw, the then home secretary. In 1988 Mrs Thatcher banned his voice from being broadcast but a decade later Tony Blair negotiated with him as a key participant in the peace process. Today he has easy access to the top British leadership. But Adams has not ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever needed an eye surgeon (which she did not), and his mad wife, Speranza, had lived, where they had raised their son Oscar, who was four years dead by this time. There’s now a funny ...”