“... Charles Reade led a strenuous campaign in the Daily Telegraph which successfully pushed the Home Secretary into remitting the sentence. Riots were feared in Liverpool after the conspicuously unsound conviction and death sentence passed on Florence Maybrick in 1889; but executions generally fed a public appetite. Twenty thousand people went to watch ...”

“... leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from filming, recording or ...”

“... bought a new 78, enjoying the sound of big band and some American singers. One week she brought home a record by Elvis Presley. Her son already knew the name: the previous weekend in the local barber’s he had come across a photo of the ‘most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the ...”

“... that surprisingly donnish genre (the English tutor at Christ Church in the 1950s and 1960s, J.I.M. Stewart, wrote detective fiction as Michael Innes, and Edmund Crispin took his pseudonym from one of his novels) could be regarded as Murdoch without the metaphysics. But of course Murdoch without the metaphysics would not quite be Murdoch. Her chief contribution ...”

“... populist, that ‘without any affectation’ Wilson ‘prefers the kind of unassuming, comfortable home life which he shares with millions of ordinary families’. It comes as no surprise to find that he proposed the ‘white heat of technology’ wheeze to Wilson as a campaign theme for 1964, though Crossman’s own ignorance of scientific matters was as ...”

“... and unemotional. To their colleagues they appeared strong, stern, shy and silent; they took work home at night and at weekends; they had time for few hobbies or recreations; they jealously guarded their private lives; but in the select company of those who knew them well, they were warm-hearted, charming, kindly and ...”

“... Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the disbelieving French that Hitler would attack through the Ardennes, and who was later appropriated by ...”

“... as the floor, wall or ceiling of a hospital ward, it stops growing and starts to die. Its natural home is the front of the human nose, the part that is picked. Most of us have it there at some time in our lives. About 20 per cent of the population carry it throughout their lives, 60 per cent intermittently, and 20 per cent never. In some people it inhabits ...”

“... is mentioned on several occasions in the inventory as adorning the furnishings of Elisabetta’s home. However, Fortini Brown has discovered that Elisabetta’s brother’s legitimacy was questioned, and she includes an illustration showing the page of the Libro d’Oro, the Venetian register of nobility, on which his name is struck out. We may therefore ...”

“... with the idea of buying each of its readers a printer to print the newspaper for themselves at home. The internet was well established by 1997, but usage hadn’t taken off. Some newspapers had basic websites, but few visited them. The dominant mode of accessing the internet was the slow and inconvenient dial-up method; few ...”

“... be called the pre-revolutionary period, the quarter-century between the death in 1891 of Charles Stewart Parnell, the doomed founder and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and 1916, deserves a deeper investigation, ‘at the personal level of individual lives’, than has yet been carried out. He is rightly wary of first-hand accounts written after the ...”

“... obviously political. He belonged to a social crowd that didn’t intersect much with mine: Home Counties, landed gentry, a stockbroker father somehow involved – the customary expensive vagueness – ‘in finance’, a grand house I could only imagine and probably in those days envied. These boys all knew one another from somewhere else, fraternised ...”

“... what it is, Leibniz says, is in fact to imagine another world entirely. If I had chosen to stay at home today instead of going to the library, then we would all be living in a different ‘possible world’ – a world that contains not me, freely choosing a day in the library, but someone else, exactly like me except for deciding to spend the day at ...”

“... no doubt that Clancy knows the back lots and the business. For his B-list screenwriting client Stewart Stern, Clancy pulled off a coup by getting him big bucks and a big assignment: Rebel without a Cause. Afterwards, according to Clancy, Jack Warner pushed him against the wall – ‘He positively fire breathes Brut aftershave’ – and tore him off a ...”

“... fortune had collapsed as a result of the coal strike, forcing the Bells to abandon her favourite home, Rounton Grange. Her beloved half-brother, Hugo, had died of typhoid contracted in South Africa. King Feisal, whom she had always idolised, found it politic to avoid her, in order to keep the militant nationalists quiet. Her health was poor, and ...”