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“... cannot be giving him much pleasure at the moment). But he also appears to be just as keen as Beaverbrook on using his papers to promote his ideas, some of which – such as his support for British membership of Nafta – are as hare-brained as anything Beaverbrook championed. He owes his control of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph to the managerial ...”

“... or abandoned to bewail their fate on a stage constructed out of gallstones and other body casts. Peter the Great bought the lot for the huge sum of 30,000 Dutch guilders in 1717, and had them shipped to Russia. Both Fragonard and Ruysch were decidedly odd characters, brooders who took their discipline to a pitch well beyond the necessary degree of scientific ...”

“... on as usual. Names central to Renaissance scholarship appear on page after page – Thomas More, Peter Giles, Martin Dorpius, Pirckheimer, Amerbach, Tunstall, Lascaris, Zazius. So do the names of people for whom Erasmus scholars feel especial warmth – Grocyn, say, or William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who put up with a great deal, for Erasmus ...”

“... to intrude in a way that doesn’t always quite work. There’s a politician in Slow Horses called Peter Judd who’s clearly modelled on Boris Johnson (‘fluffy-haired’ etc) and crops up in several of the later novels, so it’s jarring when ‘Boris bikes’ get a mention in Real Tigers (though they could hardly be ‘...”

“... though Binyon, with customary care, thinks Cameroon the likelier origin. He was a gift for Peter the Great, and rose from servitude to become a general in the Army, responsible by the end of his career for all military engineering in Russia. Pushkin’s father belonged to a family that had distinguished itself in public affairs in the late 16th ...”

“... mildest fluctuations of fashion. There are echoes, here of the revisionist Ruskinian aesthetic of Peter Fuller, although Marwick adds an erotic sub-plot to ginger things up, quoting Freud: ‘There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of “beautiful” has its roots in sexual excitation and its original meaning was “sexually stimulating”.’ This adds ...”

“... with a furrowed brow. He and his co-anchormen enjoy the needling, come-off-it stuff but they are keen also to be thought of as concerned champions of the electorate – as closer, somehow, to the common people than vote-hungry politicians are, or want to be. Their TV duty, they would have us think, is to cut through all the electioneering double-talk and ...”

“... may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave ...”

“... interventions produced such enormous results that, by 1983, the then minister for agriculture, Peter Walker, was able to claim that the UK was now 75 per cent self-sufficient in temperate foodstuffs and, more remarkable still, according to the boast of the Conservative Campaign Guide that year, 100 per cent self-sufficient in wheat.Free trade zealots ...”

“... for hours at a time, and that he switched to badminton in the winter, and was all year round keen on winning. His dismay at Bunny Austin’s defeat at Wimbledon is compensated by his joy at belatedly discovering squash. Nor did he scorn team games (cricket, football). It is barely possible not to wonder how he could combine these healthy interests with ...”

“... On the Labour side, Laws’s old friend (and a former Liberal Democrat) Andrew Adonis was still keen to explore the options but the rest of them just didn’t seem that interested. Peter Mandelson was detached (‘Surely the rich have suffered enough,’ he says at one point, when Laws tries to find some common ground on ...”

“... the abyss. By 2006, with Bush still insisting that the war was going swimmingly and the Pentagon keen to hand the war over to the Iraqis, it seemed that the US was heading for a catastrophic defeat. If it proceeded with plans to pull out, many observers felt certain that Iraq would descend into chaos. Failure, they warned, would discredit the entire ...”

“... is down for the first time since the financial crash of 2008, although the Sunday Times is keen to calm the nerves, reporting that ‘this is not a crash: it’s a correction.’ There were too many overvalued companies and too many evil people claiming to be British.I’m glad we got that sorted out. Meanwhile, the heart refuses to break at news of ...”

“... the FSB, showed that ‘Moscow’s goals went beyond mere cultural understanding. The Kremlin was keen … to mute criticism of Russia’s human rights record … [and] desperate to stop top officials from being denied entry to the UK as part of a US-style “Magnitsky list”.’ The Magnitsky bill, which is supported by MPs from both sides of the Commons ...”

“... the name. The novel was finished in 1969 and was published in America in 1974, translated by Peter Kussi, who has now revised his translation. The provisional title referred to the lifespan of Jaromil, who dies young, as lyric poets will, but also to the enforced, mass-produced, writer-proclaimed revolutionary ardours which ensued in 1948. At the ...”