“... If today,’ writes Eamonn McCann, ‘the Lord Chief Justice were appointed as a one-person tribunal to inquire into a major political problem affecting Ireland, there would be a rattle of empty laughter throughout the land.’ That, he says, is a ‘measure of how far the British judiciary has fallen in esteem over the last twenty years ...”

“... in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust.’ Ten years later, Johnson was sacked for fondling one pupil too many and changed his name to Cory. After his ...”

“... Bernard Donoughue records something said by James Callaghan, then Prime Minister, just before the 1979 General Election, as the two men were driving home to Downing Street in the official Rover: You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do ...”

“... Charles James Fox was early hailed as ‘the phenomenon of the age’: an Infant Phenomenon like his chief opponent and perfect foil, William Pitt, who, Fox’s mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan dissipation, already strong on him, did not distract him ...”

“... a grain of sand, falling whispering with the grace of multitudes, through the fingers of the Lord. Lest this seem a bit windy, it should be said that more usually, Hugh’s commentary uses poetry to cut through ‘poetry’, a proper Careyesque paradox: In the Marsh life was very slow as I recall although no BOWL OF CHERRIES, bitter wind from the ...”

“... black, with their entirely bogus link to the tribal names of Highland Scotland, described by the Lord Lyon King of Arms as ‘humbug’ and by Lt-Col. M. M. Haldane in the most closely-argued study of the matter as a ‘myth’. I owe this information to the Highlander magazine for August, published from Chicago and itself partly a catalogue of clannish ...”

“... or being pursued by Lords Cholmondeley, Coleraine and others, before she settled down with Charles James Fox. Though many, perhaps most, of the women travellers were eminently respectable, being accompanied by husbands or fathers (like Horace Walpole’s darling Mary and Agnes Berry), a surprising number went on their own. The amorous affairs of the young ...”

“... impostors of all: women who masqueraded as military men. The tyrannical army surgeon Dr James Barry – prone to picking quarrels and partial to red-heeled, thigh-high boots paired with an outsized dress sword – doesn’t figure in Stoker’s parade. It’s a strange omission – Barry’s story was well known to Edwardians – but Stoker had ...”

“... pocket-slim volumes of the Buildings of England, take years to complete each hefty replacement. James Bettley, responsible for the new Essex volume, did not even have to bother with Ilford, Romford, Leyton and Walthamstow. With the setting up of the GLC and the new administrative boundaries of 1965, Essex, as the blurb to the Shell Guide quaintly puts ...”

“... Fanny has had a long gestation. In 1961, as an undergraduate, she was taught by the late Professor James L. Clifford, Johnson’s biographer, who had the admirable policy of inviting his class to imitate an 18th-century author instead of writing yet another academic paper on him. At the time, Ms Jong came up with a mock epic in heroic couplets in the manner of ...”

“... leave hardly any room, if experienced in the flesh, for a satisfaction of the wish to write books. James Pfeiffer tells how he wishes to be a fisherman, and to have a boat of his own one day, an inshore lobster boat. Meanwhile, for the duration of the novel, he goes quite far out to sea on board the Grey Ghost, a trawler whose crew meets with a succession of ...”

“... as authoritative, rather than authorised. An authorised biography was to have been written by James Pope-Hennessy, who had gathered much material before he came to his violent end. Hoare received the ‘approval and co-operation’ of the Coward estate. Over the years other hands had tried to pluck away the veils from the Coward legend. We read how ...”

“... It may be an accident of rereading that makes me want to put James Baldwin’s essays and novels together, to see The Fire Next Time and Giovanni’s Room, for example, as versions of each other. But the matched books do make interesting sense: more thoughtful sense, perhaps, than the already powerful separate stories ...”

“... begetter of admiration in other people. Yet none that loved him could easily match the love of James Boswell, who puttered along for many years, joyously, drunkenly, boisterously, earnestly, with his love of Dr Johnson both a wondrous act of worship and a curious kind of self-loving. Arm in arm on their way up the High Street, Boswell and Johnson were a ...”

“... provides a worthy set-piece climax where we seem to know every inch of pavement over which Lord Revelstoke of Barings hurries in tears. Above the masses of clerks and fraudsters and Quakers and spivs, three heroes stand out and preside over Kynaston’s account. The first is Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who on page five irrupts into the narrative, which is ...”