“... merely pretending. Much of this ‘renewal’ had, of course, been achieved by Neil Kinnock and John Smith, while the numerical and political decline of the unions, together with a change in the composition of the electorate and the Labour Party’s membership, made ‘renewal’ much easier and, at least to some extent, necessary. Nevertheless, Mr Blair ...”

“... Montaigne, but was curiously silent about his many thefts from Burton. They were first spotted by John Ferriar, a Manchester physician, who in 1793 published a sympathetic but puzzled essay on Sterne’s indebtedness to the Anatomy: ‘I do not mean to treat him as a Plagiarist,’ he writes. ‘I wish to illustrate’ – to celebrate – ‘not to degrade ...”

“... before a special jury, at Warwickshire Assizes. The defendants included the venerable Major John Cartwright, the ‘Father’ of English Reformers; the editor of the Radical Black Dwarf, T.J. Wooler; and Edmonds, the secretary of the Birmingham reformers. Their offences arose out of the same context as the Peterloo meeting in support of manhood ...”

“... ship’s displacement tonnage was 52,310. The figure usually given – 46,000 – refers to its Gross Registered Tonnage, which is arrived at through a complicated algorithm and has nothing to do with ordinary measurements of weight.) One might have known that naming a ship after the defeated race of Greek deities was a mistake. Kronos, the leader of the ...”

“... pieces, such as Maniac-Ravings and The Corsican Pest, operate at a considerably lower level. Gross conceptions finely executed, they perform their cheap trick with unmistakable gusto: Napoleon stamping the ground in a rage like Rumpelstiltskin (his angry jig has punctured another globe with a hole in the vicinity of Cape Horn); or again, Napoleon the ...”

“... persons using the present tense: ‘I do take thee, Bridget, for my wife’; ‘I do take thee, John, for my husband.’ Henry Swinburne, whose Treatise of Spousals was published in 1686 but written a century earlier, is clear that such a contract, without solemnisation, without consummation, constitutes valid, indissoluble marriage. To marry privately in ...”

“... have taken a very different line, and in their chapter on the general law of medical negligence John Finch and Robert Cowley (respectively an academic and a practising lawyer) commend them for doing so. The Canadian Supreme Court has pointed out that what is a reasonable risk to a doctor is not always so to the patient, and that to allow medical judgment ...”

“... in October 1529, More, though a layman, was soon the Church’s most eager agent. With the help of John Stokesley, the Bishop of London, he broke into the houses of suspected heretics, arresting them on the spot and sometimes interrogating them in his own home. He imprisoned one man in the porter’s lodge of his house, and had him put in the stocks. He raided ...”

“... by the drop-off in government spending, the Truman administration was gravely worried about the gross national product, which had fallen by more than 10 per cent in 1946 alone. ‘The conclusion is inescapable,’ Marshall read in the State Department report, ‘that under the present programmes and policies, the world will not be able to continue to buy ...”

“... them. I imagine the queen having favourite walks, too. Doris always waved the question of Jean and John away and the subject was changed. How? I’m really not sure. I suspect it was partly that withering look she used to keep predators at bay, especially that trick of closing her eyes just a little longer than necessary, and also the simple fact that she ...”

“... more extraordinary that armed forces maintain impetus to attack despite heavy casualty rates. John Terraine’s The Right of the Line, a comprehensive, judicious and humane account of the RAF’s experience in the last European war, gives sympathetic attention to the stress experienced by aircrews in Bomber Command, which realised as time went on that men ...”

“... But almost any of the babies depicted in paintings of the Nativity, sometimes spindly, sometimes gross, were they taken along to a baby clinic today, would arouse concern. A paediatrician would have to ask Mary some very searching questions. The National Gallery is particularly rich in Gossaert’s work, not all of which I like, but none of his other ...”

“... the tales that Rée includes within his metaphysics remind us that Western sensibilities, however gross they may still seem to the more sensitive among us, have changed for the better. The same Castel tells of a prince of Halle (Handel’s birthplace) bored out of his mind until visited by an itinerant musician with a harpsichord guaranteed to cure ...”

“... These opening chapters leave us accepting that Elvis Presley, towards the end of his life, was a gross drug-abusing sybarite with lousy taste (what did we expect?), but wondering what can be the origin of the strange sexy excitement Goldman derives from telling us about it. Why will he not accord Elvis even the status of a male member of the human tribe? But ...”

“... it disturbing that Krauss and Karajan conducted very fine Parsifals, are we subscribing to the gross fallacy Cosima supported from the other side, through her belief that a Jewish conductor (Hermann Levi) could not penetrate the sacred mystery? On the other hand, if we aren’t disturbed, what becomes of Wagner’s idealistic belief that a ...”