“... Rotters’ Club.5 The last, and most famous, was the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis (‘Jack’) and Charles Williams, at Oxford in the 1930s. On this subject, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1978 study, The Inklings, last revised in 1997, is the place to start.Religion: Mabel, his widowed mother, was a Roman Catholic convert, and Tolkien at least believed that her Low ...”

“... to be there. The lawyers were headed by Stephens, an ebullient, red-faced mucker straight out of Dickens, saturated in media savvy. He stood among the sureties and supporters: Tony Benn, Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, James Fox and Bella Freud, and the five or so young people I associated with WikiLeaks. We were led up to seats in the gallery they’d saved for ...”

“... enough, in the folkloric atmosphere of this particular story, to turn him into a villain out of Dickens: Ralph Nickleby with bells on. If Feilding-Mellen hadn’t existed, they would have had to invent him, curly hair and country seat included. In the end, they invented him even so, and said of him what they wanted to say. Out of the cardboard cut-outs and ...”