“... About​ two thirds of the way into Spectre, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is tied to a chair in the desert crater headquarters of Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), the head of Spectre and by coincidence both the son and the murderer of a man who took the young Bond under his wing. Oberhauser is operating a contraption that threatens to deprive Bond of his facial recognition abilities by driving a pair of pins into the sides of his skull – a painful operation in its initial stages, as indicated by Craig’s grimacing and an uncontained scream ...”

“... most dangerous product of modern civilisation – still, as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in the world’. Wilde, he wrote, was ‘charming, at the same time; unimaginable, and, above all, a very great personality ...”

“... example. Perhaps even this is not required: the ‘standards of perfection’ might require it, Lord Justice Lawton said in the first Court of Appeal judgment, but inquiries need not be perfect. When he first considered the question, Lord Denning said that individuals should be afforded ‘a fair opportunity for ...”

“... described as a ‘working-class agitator and politician’. On his ennoblement, Marshal of the RAF Lord Douglas of Kirtleside admitted to being ‘a moderate socialist’, which, as his biographer explains, made him ‘a somewhat unusual member of the higher military hierarchy’. There also seems to be much more space devoted to practitioners of ...”

“... subtitle, ‘interpreters of our cultural tradition’. It may be stretching a point to include Lord Leverhulme in that category. The preservation of the cultural tradition costs money, and Leverhulme had lots and used it honourably, recognising that nature and art are ‘needs of the mind’. Soap ads and drawings of Port Sunlight are here augmented by ...”

“... and nibbling at the edges of philosophical debate, sometimes in the company of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, H.G. Wells and the Webbs. Today they are easily characterised as an unripened Bloomsbury Group: a celebrity clique composed of men and women unconventional in dress and conversation, literary and artistic, overlapping in their sexual commitments, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... example, decries the idolatry of those who worship ‘with their backs towards the temple of the Lord, and their faces towards the east’, yet Genesis locates Eden in the east, and it’s from the east that Adam and Eve must journey after the Fall. The Gospel of Matthew tells the faithful they should look to the east for the second coming: ‘For as 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His poetry used regularly to be left out of Australian anthologies, but that is an old bad habit we may have grown out of by now. Mr James’s name attracts far more affection than odium, and he gets away with ...”

“... snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has ...”

“... role in the slave trade or scrambled to defend their property from the strategic abolitionism of Lord Dunmore. Schama even manages to present the American Revolution, in the South at least, as being waged ‘first and foremost to protect slavery’, an audacious claim. His contrast between a Britain of eccentric abolitionists and an America of tyrannical ...”

“... efforts failed to establish Oliver Cromwell securely in the Victorian pantheon. The names of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington summon up public houses rather than heroes. Winston Churchill in this century, like the Elder Pitt in the 18th and the Younger Pitt in the 19th, was buried with ceremony then swiftly consigned to history: which means that ...”