“... of Frank Vincent Zappa’s monstrous oeuvre. It’s a stroll to realign (straighten out) the gross products of this freak-wrangler supreme, the Laurel Canyon, cottage industry, family man. Zappa: boastfully non-PC, polymorphously perverse, the L. Ron Hubbard of multi-tracked deviance. An agnostic refusenik who gets paranoid standing next to his own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not ...”

“... Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals ...”

“... Sunrise promoter turned cybercriminal Tony Colston-Hayter, were straight-up capitalists.) When John Major launched his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign in 1993, ravers were an obvious target. A year later, his government passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which gave the police the power to shut down any nocturnal open-air gathering of more ...”