“... is enormous, mad, unreadable. One answer is Joyce, of course. Another – The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) – is J.R.R. Tolkien.A writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European ...”

“... on the coast of Madagascar, where New York merchants often brought them supplies and news from home, and then making for the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the coast of India. Their obvious prey was the shipping of those parts rather than the large, powerful East Indiamen, but that made things no pleasanter for the Company, which was held responsible ...”

“... statute of treasons drawn up in 1351, it was an offence to ‘compass or imagine the death of our lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’ had entered the English ...”

“... Dublin made me, the autobiography of Todd Andrews, is to be welcomed. Andrews has been a kind of Lord Robens or Doctor Beeching of Irish life, presiding over the destinies of state companies and exercising considerable influence in the governing Fianna Fail party founded by Mr De Valera. But the story of these years of power has yet to come. This first ...”

“... between 1973 and 1983, and of torture between 1988 and 1992. A divisional court presided over by Lord Bingham has quashed both warrants on the ground that as a former head of state Pinochet is by statute immune from prosecution, but has stayed the quashing of the second – the torture warrant – in order that the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police and the ...”

“... jurisdictions cease.’ It had, according to Coke in 1615, ‘the survey of all other courts’. Lord Chancellor Ellesmere sought to resist this assertion, contending that the Royal Council, not the King’s Bench, was the ‘chief watch tower for all points of misgovernment’, but a series of assertive chief justices (notably Popham, Fleming and Coke) had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... touching earth, not touching nothing on their path through the trees. And Al prospered before the Lord. Psalm 36 Even at night, laid out like in a coffin,    he can’t sleep for the evil in his heart, he is weaving baskets to catch fish    swimming home in fish water, that is the sinfulness of the wicked;    so ...”

“... usually the ablest man in the party. From 1832, the 19th-century Conservative leaders were Peel, Lord Derby, Disraeli and Lord Salisbury. Except possibly Derby, who was at least as interested in translating the classics as in governing the country, they were all excellent leaders and the best men for the job. Much the same ...”

“... their grandmother dies, their aunt Sylvie gives up her life riding the freight trains and comes home to look after the girls, trying her best to domesticate herself but not entirely succeeding: the house fills up with empty cans and old newspapers; she buys the girls pink sequinned slippers but they don’t have clothes to wear to school. Sylvie prefers the ...”

“... came slowly even after 9/11: only five people were stripped of British citizenship by Labour home secretaries, and the emblematic bogeyman of the era, the hook-handed Abu Hamza, repeatedly dodged moves to annul the Britishness he had gained through marriage. He didn’t manage to elude extradition to the United States, where he has now been jailed for ...”

“... protection nor justice. The Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday, which was carried out by the lord chief justice, absolved the British army and backed its false account of 13 murders, ensuring that Irish nationalists would see the legal system as being aligned against them. We should keep all this in mind as we look at the experiences of our new suspect ...”

“... a teacher in New York and has contributed round-ups of quotations to the New York Times, Ladies’ Home Journal and – since he is no prude – to Playboy. The American orientation of the book is very strong: so strong that while there are many pages of quotations on baseball, basketball and American football, there is not a line about British football or ...”

“... business, Henry James, another unkindred spirit, Tolstoy another, Strindberg another, and, nearer home, Gilbert Murray and the lecherous, contentious and extremely able Wells). He worked heroically to keep the Court Theatre going, to overthrow the stage censorship, to educate the public in all ethical, civic and artistic affairs. He feuded with ...”

“... by ‘albino blackbirds, mauve monkeys, a leopard, a boa constrictor, and, among Englishmen, Lord Berners’. The presiding spirit was Oscar Wilde. Robert Ross, Wilde’s literary executor, was the keeper of the flame and the still centre of London’s homosexual subculture. When, in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the bisexual Billy Prior is introduced ...”