“... the cruddy world of politics and sees hilarity in its tiny events. He knows his subjects (‘James Callaghan, the Harold Wilson of politics’). He knows that Mr Healey is clever, and will therefore lose the argument. And he reminds us that Mr Heseltine is ‘a blonde’. Johnson quotes his namesake, the good Doctor, on taking care to see ‘that the ...”

“... little of Mozart, saying he tinkled. Of his literary dislikes, the most striking is for Henry James, whom he misses few chances to disparage. His treatment of The Ambassadors in Aspects of the Novel is an obvious instance, but there are others, sometimes describable as sly digs, sometimes as pure dislike. He professed to believe that ...”

“... was all set, in its competent and agreeable fashion, to carry on as before. According to Henry James, in 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire ...”

“... depending on ‘both the quality or otherwise of the audience and Lola’s mood each night’, as James Morton writes in his entertaining biography. And sometimes ‘it depended on what money was thrown on stage.’ More or fewer parts of Lola’s body might be exposed during the dance, which was in two parts. In the first, she played the spider, spinning its ...”

“... Edwards spotted an announcement in the New Times that the cabinet were meeting for a dinner at Lord Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square the following night. What a golden opportunity to decapitate the lot of them! Edwards had of course inserted the announcement himself: the cabinet dined elsewhere, though Harrowby’s staff were kept busy cooking and ...”

“... the most important members of the reigning Whig Junto – the Duke of Shrewsbury, Sir John Somers, Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal and soon to be Lord High Chancellor, Lord Romney, Sir Edward Russell the First Lord of the Admiralty, and some others – to ...”

“... itself on this arrangement, which it sees as having the merit of flexibility). But, as the late Lord Bingham said, the absence of codification means that, ‘constitutionally speaking, we now find ourselves in a trackless desert without map or compass.’ Determining what our constitution requires, what fundamental rules it sets out, is as difficult and ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”

“... which was published in 1937 as Letters from Iceland. It contained not only Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and ...”

“... performance in France and Belgium in the First World War has received mixed reviews. General Sir James Edmonds, editor of the official history of the war, declared Allenby’s record on the Western Front ‘one of gross stupidity from first to last’. On the other hand, Colonel Repington, the influential military correspondent of the Times, pronounced him ...”

“... modest critical success and further novels followed: Barham Downs (1784), The Fair Syrian (1787), James Wallace (1788), Man as He Is (1792) and finally Hermsprong. Bage told Godwin that he believed ‘he should not have written novels, but for want of books to assist him in any other literary undertaking.’ Not that the reluctant novelist was uneducated. In ...”

“... have to fight harder to hold on to what they had and act more aggressively to grab what was left. Lord Rosebery told the Royal Colonial Institute in 1893 that the British Empire had no choice but to keep expanding: ‘We are engaged at the present moment, in the language of mining, in “pegging out claims” for the future.’ All this strained the ...”

“... priest led the little boy to Christ, and ever after, Pi tells us, he could not help thanking Lord Krishna for sending Jesus his way. A similar encounter in a mosque rendered Pi a worshipper in three different traditions. He tells us that since then – and despite the ordeal of the shipwreck – he has been a believer; Martel is already announcing his ...”

“... depict contests for world domination as Manichean battles against monstrous opponents (as in The Lord of the Rings), the heroic model in antiquity demanded a contest between two noble adversaries. Even when the ‘other’ is a monster, like the centaurs seen in Greek temple friezes grappling with Heracles and the Lapiths, it is idealised and humanised, its ...”

“... of the 2011 riots, Starmer demanded expedited hearings in 24-hour courts. His predecessor as DPP, Lord MacDonald, described the resulting sentences – including four years for incitement by Facebook post of disorder that never happened – as lacking ‘humanity or justice’. Starmer himself made a 4 a.m. morale-boosting visit to a court in ...”