“... engagements with prostitutes patronised by other members of the libertine Hellfire Club. In 1776, David Hume reported that Banks and Sandwich had gone fishing, joined by ‘two or three Ladies of pleasure’. Everybody knew this sort of thing about Banks, and there’s no evidence that he much minded the satires or that they did him any damage. Wealth has its ...”

“... the point of all this sport-watching? What is it for? I even had a title, drawn from a remark David Sexton, the literary editor of the Evening Standard, once made to me. ‘I’m not interested in sport,’ he said, ‘but I often wish I were, given that the mind is always in pain.’ The mind is always in pain … Yes, given that, you can easily see why ...”

“... it might have posed to the Conservative electoral juggernaut at the 2015 election. Nick Clegg and David Laws would have done better to reflect on the lessons of the 1880s. If free-market pro-EU Liberals had fought the 2015 election as a small but boisterous and essential entity within a Cameron-led coalition, on the model of the Liberal Unionists after ...”

“... rules is seen as old-fashioned nonsense.In 2010 an early list of the quangos to be abolished by David Cameron’s new coalition included the administrative branch of the Supreme Court. Now even more direct threats have been made, with government supporters openly questioning the need for such an adjudicative body and various reviews being conducted into ...”

“... for Grey, was the unique freedom it offered to ignore parliamentary and press opinion. Grey never held ministerial office in any other department, so developed no experience of public-facing politics. This profoundly limited his own education. Many of his official papers were not even circulated to the full cabinet. Otte suggests that ministers probably ...”

“... including, crucially, the election-denying secretary of state candidates. And the Democrats held on to their majority in the Senate and might even increase it if Raphael Warnock prevails over Herschel Walker, a Republican former football star, in the Georgia run-off on 6 December. (That Walker is regarded as a plausible candidate is one of the strange ...”

“... Vega Gupta’s​ wedding was a four-day, three-million dollar extravaganza held at a five-star hotel in Sun City, South Africa, in May 2013. Two hundred guests arrived from New Delhi on a chartered Airbus that was allowed to land at a nearby military airbase. Vega’s uncle Atul Gupta met the guests, who were taken to the resort without any passport or visa checks ...”

“... her partner of almost fifty years.The relationship, Mullard later told Renault’s biographer David Sweetman, was confusing, exciting, intensely romantic and nerve-racking. Neither had much sexual experience, but Mullard thought Renault knew a little more, and from the first they hid their relationship – from the hospital, and later from the sidelong ...”

“... and (a claim which I do not remember to have seen made before) ‘the reader’s attention is held throughout.’ An indication of the complexities or confusions (as you like) of the poem is that the final scene – the cherry drops into the narrator’s hands, and he eats it – which would most obviously be taken as having the same sexual significance ...”

“... by something of a pause, and the Prime Minister recently announced that a conference would be held of all the races,including – which the proposal does not – the blacks. The scheme provides for three of everything –prime ministers, cabinets, parliaments, regional administrators, mayors, town councils – for the white, Coloured and Indian ...”

“... of female sexual insensibility surprising: they make it incredible. Whether or not Acton genuinely held such a conviction in a restricted form (‘the majority ... are not very much troubled’), an unforced reading of his remarks – without any resort to Freud for a ‘leap’ of interpretation – strongly suggests that his readers did not. (A similar ...”

“... the ones at Bobby Van’s. The core included Vogel, Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen ...”

“... on the main roads into London, they would hire coaches or post-chaises in the hope of being held up. The six men who formed the Bow Street front line were supported by a small clerical staff, whose duties included advertising crimes in the newspapers (to solicit witnesses and alert pawnbrokers) and keeping the record books, which would become invaluable ...”

“... and womanhood – whatever those might be – to the job. In the run-up to election day, she held a series of ‘women only’ events. She taunted hostile male crowds with the thought that even if they didn’t vote for her, their wives would. And so they did. Nancy begged Plymouth not to elect her with a ‘nasty, stingy little majority’ because she ...”

“... and Beowulf’. Perhaps because of the success of his popular writings, Lewis was not held in universally high regard in Oxford and was twice passed over for a professorship. In 1954 Cambridge created a new chair in Medieval and Renaissance English, and Lewis seems to have been widely regarded as the obvious contender. After a brief episode of ...”