“... they had each accepted £1000 in return for tabling Parliamentary written questions. The same ‘cash for questions’ controversy also later accounted for two senior ministers, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton, who had to leave their posts at the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Trade respectively. The paradox behind this extraordinary succession of ...”

“... while at the same time feuding with the left over wealth taxes and stimulus cheques. Similarly, William Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize-winning climate economist, has spent much of his career since the 1970s policing the boundary between climate alarmism and what his work suggests is reasonable policy: his models acknowledge the climate crisis, but characterise ...”

“... the kingdom of England itself, but a large proportion testified to pious Anglo-Norman energy after William I’s conquest of England in 1066, resulting in the formation of a diverse range of communities whose distinctive ‘rules’ for communal life were an implied criticism of the monasteries that had gone before. Well-functioning monasteries constantly do ...”

“... Tupelo. His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the ...”

“... To His Sacred Majesty), on the new baby heir to James II (Britannia Rediviva); though never on William and Mary. Theological disputation, first Anglican in complexion (Religio Laici), then Roman Catholic (The Hind and the Panther). Historical chronicle (Annus Mirabilis). Translation: from Homer, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Chaucer and others; and of ...”

“... at the time. Heath was left to devise his own plans with his own trusted associates, crucially Sir William Armstrong, the head of the home Civil Service. Vic Feather of the TUC called Armstrong ‘deputy Prime Minister’, and this expressed a truth not so much about Armstrong’s impropriety in becoming ‘political’ as about Heath’s increasing detachment ...”

“... by my father from two abandoned rural slum dwellings and definitely not a part of Pamela’s William Barnes rustic dream – seems at first not to exist. All I know of it, as we drive down the narrow road, where ivied trees allow light in blinding flashes or not at all, is that it was put together as a new home for my father’s ...”

“... because the Americans could not be sure that the UN would pay the bills (the organisation has a cash-flow problem, not unconnected to overdue contributions from its major donor). Perhaps the ghosts of a million Rwandan dead provide a clue to the Secretary of State’s readiness to use force when genocide threatened in Kosovo. Armies blunder despite unity of ...”

“... began prosaically enough, with the News of the World’s revelation on 6 November 2005 that Prince William had strained his knee. Its source – William’s voicemail – didn’t make the scoop much more remarkable; British redtops had been listening in to royal phone calls for more than ten years, and earlier tap-and-tell ...”

“... house, and a wee-hours screening of our host in an unimpressive video, dressed up as Johnny Cash (‘I’m a sucker for despair, for faltering’). ‘A conceptual fuck’ is the way Chris describes her experience of the evening over breakfast the next morning; she then goes on obsessing and obsessing. And Sylvère indulges it, maybe because it’s a ...”

“... be valued in monetary terms, as they had been throughout their lives: the slave-owners received cash or cheques. The struggles of enslaved people, including the major rebellion of 1831 which finally convinced the British Parliament that chattel slavery in the British Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius had to end, resulted in semi-freedom. The system of ...”

“... ceiling doesn’t help. Nor the perch of CCTV cameras keeping vigil on the permanent queue for the cash machine. Search the list for a lost relative and you are bang in the middle of the surveillance frame. Cameras are spiked like hedgehogs. Anybody withdrawing money, buying a railway ticket, is guilty. You are in the station’s memory loop, on tape: part of ...”

“... business as a Maltese cat’.Mabel now concentrated on their publicity strategy. She contacted William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who agreed to write a piece on Dickinson. Of all the reviewers of the 1890 volume, Howells was the most intuitive:Occasionally, the outside of the poem, so to speak, is left so rough, so rude, that the art ...”

“... wharfinger who soon succumbs to cholera. Adopted by a parson and educated as a doctor, his son William turns up at Guy’s Hospital playing hand to the mind of James Hinton – a surgeon in whose philosophy the Ripper’s role as ‘time’s abortionist’ is first outlined. White Chappell is preoccupied by the Ripper murders, but Sinclair is not seeking ...”

“... saying to a Shadow Cabinet meeting on 31 July 1971, ‘the address on which my father’ – William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal, then Labour MP, created Viscount Stansgate in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if ...”