“... Elizabeth’s; Mary’s is a bit taller too, as arranged by her son and Elizabeth’s successor, James VI and I. Other bona fide royal treasures which the busy visitor mostly passes by include Henry III’s gorgeous 13th-century mosaic Cosmati pavement in front of the high altar, and the portrait of Richard II, the abbey’s other profligate royal patron. It ...”

“... immediacy and metaphysical urgency, his material weight and his spiritual profundity. So Clive James can’t be blamed for joining the ranks of the respectable failures. He has given us a Dante who is approachable and affable, and almost always readable, but who is unequivocally heavy rather than fluid or mellifluous. When ...”

“... trial made the same journey in a minibus escorted by ten police motorbikes. The trial judge, Lord Beckett, lawyers, court staff and Packer, now 51, wearing a mask and walking with a stick, were there too. They went off the track and into the woods to the stream where Caldwell was found. I had been almost persuaded of Packer’s guilt by the police ...”

“... interest ... should you not rather propose that all power and domination should be given to the Lord?’ Sedgwick, like many others, was frank about the extent to which he regarded the rule of the Saints as made necessary by the reluctance of sinners to be governed as they should be: ‘we cannot in reason expect to have a free Parliament at this ...”

“... one or two feeble excuses for his hostility to the study of post-Chaucerian English at Oxford. Lord David Cecil’s ‘gentlemanly and rather old-fashioned scholarship’ is duly noted, but ‘this is not to disparage Lord David’s accomplishments, either as critic or biographer.’ Why not? Even Empson’s expulsion ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... how much of it? The procession is now halted. We are in William Street, just at the back of the James Street Presbyterian Church. There are Army snipers positioned in the skylights of James Street houses, and on the asphalt roof of the GPO sorting office. Some kids lob stones at these outlying troops from a patch of waste ...”

“... as well as on the Languet-Sidney correspondence and other letters secured by the private scholar James Osborn and published in his Young Philip Sidney (1972). Sidney’s life was a warp of virtue woven onto the woof of fortune. It was one of history’s ironies that Philip II of Spain was his godfather, and gave him his name. His fortune was to be a ...”

“... the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, leader of the Whigs opposed to the accession of the Catholic James II. The 1st Earl was immortalised as the satanic Achitophel of Dryden’s brilliant exercise in monarchist propaganda: ‘For close designs and crooked counsels fit,/Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit’. To his grandson, however, he was the epitome of ...”

“... which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the vault of an outside privy. That’s the sort of court-room occasion the Victorians loved. Newspaper agitation for the commuting of death ...”

“... its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office ...”

“... dies. Journalists who worked for Beaverbrook speak of him with a combination of awe and affection. James Macmillan and John Ellison, who were so much of the Daily Express for so long, describe this slow, mocking North American voice coming over the phone with approbation or a grumble and always creating a frisson. Both have said to me, ‘You would have liked ...”

“... how this large segment of the population was motivated to oppose British rule to the bitter end. Lord North took his time mobilising British forces and wasted the summer of 1775, when the colonists were still riding high from their victories at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. Fischer calls Gage ‘the most powerful man in North America’ in the summer ...”

“... offices became more substantial and their relations with their clients more formal. William Kent, Lord Burlington’s house-guest for most of his life, stands on the pre-professional side of the divide: Sir John Soane, architect of the Bank of England, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, on the post-professional side. The careers Dorothy Stroud ...”

“... he resembled a prosperous small businessman who liked to remind people he had served a term as lord mayor. He talked too much, a failing exacerbated by his reedy, high-pitched voice with lingering hints of cockney. He was, in a word that cannot now be employed with the double layer of irony it could once carry, ‘common’. In short, he was ...”