“... London. ‘Lodgings’ sound modest enough, a bit like actors’ digs; but a few years ago I got home from my summer holiday to find messages on the answerphone from several broadsheet legal correspondents. After a false start (I phoned a journalist friend to ask what this was likely to be about. ‘Haven’t you seen?’ he said. ‘Judge and rentboy ...”

“... a hanging,’ he writes, ‘that James and John were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and [Lord John Russell, the home secretary] could neither be bothered to save them, nor dared to court public opprobrium by changing the law.’ This was ‘one of the great injustices of British legal history – the judicial ...”

“... Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982. The book may sell: but not to Lord Carrington. Mrs Thatcher’s England is also the theme of a curious book written by Count Filo della Torre, the London correspondent of the newspaper La Repubblica. It is a labour of love. The third book is another of Cosgrave’s works, Thatcher: The First ...”

“... Two months after the suspension of Stormont in 1972, Belfast’s retiring Lord Mayor, Sir Joseph Cairns, delivered a farewell speech in which he reflected on the political situation. Ulster, he said, had been cynically betrayed by Britain’s policies: policies that had relegated it to ‘the status of a Fuzzy Wuzzy colony ...”

“... still clambered in profusion around the House of Commons and the Cabinet. At 10 Downing Street Lord Salisbury promoted his relations so vigorously that his administration became known as the ‘Hotel Cecil’, and the apple of his eye was undoubtedly his nephew, Arthur Balfour. A delicate and bookish young man, Balfour was at first written off by men of ...”

“... medieval’; Bisson reminds us that a lot of it was. His book has an anti-hero, the ‘lord’ or dominus. We may be tempted to call him a ‘feudal lord’. The temptation should be resisted, since the title raises more questions than it solves. Bisson anyway prefers other descriptions. He is talking about ...”

“... groups the breasts of Samantha Fox and the opinions of Margaret Thatcher combine effectively. Lord Beaverbrook, a loving, unfaithful husband who had women the way most people have buttered toast, kept the Express smutless, while he promoted only those politicians he either cared for or was in alliance with. And from Bonar Law to Hugh Gaitskell, he had ...”

“... Scoop. No one who has ever worked for a paper with a baronial proprietor could fail to recognise Lord Copper and his bevvy of fawning executives. Equally, anyone who has ever been a foreign correspondent will admit that Waugh’s dreadful pack of war reporters is all too realistic. Indeed, the book has given journalists a phrase which they have adopted as ...”

“... galooting and otherwise tickling our fancies. This explains, for example, why people come home early, or stay out all night long, why we sleep in, sleep over, drink to excess, write, read or publish literary criticism, and commit crime. It certainly helps explain why Bevis Hillier has written an enormous biography of a dead English minor poet. John ...”

“... America has not, and this may account for some of the undoubted blunders in postwar Iraq. Lord Cromer, born Evelyn Baring, came from that class. With Lords Curzon and Milner, he was one of the trio of great imperial proconsuls in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He has always seemed the dullest of them, which may be why he has not been the ...”

“... way to make it so would be for one class to run the legal system, which the middle class do. Lord Devlin reminds us that in America lawyers run the political system also: ‘The Supreme Court has almost from its inception been an organ of government. Professor Cox endorses as up to date De Tocqueville’s observation that hardly a political question ...”

“... In February 1823, readers of the Times were treated to a detailed account of the goings-on in the home of the third Earl of Portsmouth and his wife of ten years, Mary Anne Hanson. She had for some time been having an affair with William Rowland Alder, a lawyer. The pair abused and mocked Lord Portsmouth, both physically and mentally, even making him a spectator to their fornication ...”

“... and the first rumours of the first Female Archbishop of Canterbury: while still In her cradle the Lord filled Her to the brim, and drove headlong The querulous demons whose riddles End only in debt and pain; her dimpled Right hand seemed to grasp and poise A miniature crozier, and her eyes Peered through tears at the sins of the world. II Weeping also, a ...”

“... are always new readers for books about it. In Dear Old Blighty E.S. Turner is concerned with the home front, on which, he says, relatively little has been written. He makes it plain that the cynical view (as in the musical play Oh what a lovely war) that this was a generation ‘duped into the Forces by damsels singing patriotic songs or bullied by ...”

“... awful bloody nose’ in the Ardennes. But Monty knew that he also had bitter enemies at home, even in the Army. After his death, he said, ‘the rats will get at me,’ but the rats did not wait that long. Like Wellington, he was soon ‘much exposed to authors’, especially American ones, and was stung into saying: ‘I think Aides should be ...”