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“... the jury Magna Carta referred to wasn’t anything like what we now understand by the term. William Holdsworth, in his History of English Law, commented: ‘A trial by a royal judge and a body of recognitors who found the facts was exactly what the barons did not want. What they did want was first a tribunal of the old type in which all the suitors were ...”

“... time fitting in without much money. He worked as a postman in Trenton, and managed to get enough cash together to join an eating club. Largely friendless and suspicious of the motives of the other members, he soon resigned. He spent a summer in Europe, discovered he had a knack for foreign languages, and resisted returning to Milwaukee, or enrolling in law ...”

“... most of the most outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William Carlos Williams wrote: ‘Bunting is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a ...”

“... tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a failure. ‘What was it he had missed?’ Kazin asks of William Dean Howells, whose modest novels fought the battle for realism as best they could. ‘Howells had missed something, and he knew it as well as the generations after him were to know it . . . He had spoken in all the accents of greatness without ever ...”

“... then suddenly dismantled because the demise of their founders left their heirs subject to a large cash charge on non-liquid assets. Never mind that the most obvious remedy for injustices of this kind was simply to raise the exemption levels (from $650,000 for individuals and $1.3 million for couples) rather than to abolish a tax whose revenue derived mostly ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”

“... we understand the same rule to apply here? If Tony Blair had been charged with selling honours for cash, could he (or John Reid, or Jacqui Smith, or whoever was home secretary at the time) have procured the grant of a pardon in the name of the queen? I can’t think any British lawyer would give an affirmative answer to the question. One ground for rejecting ...”

“... the first ‘gas bridge’ were complicated. The Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev, wanted the cash from energy exports to Europe to help fund the arms race with the US and support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But other members of the nomenklatura felt the money should be used differently. Kosygin thought it should be channelled into civilian ...”

“... and he soon became a must-see metropolitan attraction. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ...”

“... a vat of nutrient juices had been a staple of speculative fiction at least since the 1920s. In ‘William and Mary’ from 1954 (twice rejected by the New Yorker), Dahl embeds that cliché of genre fiction in a dodgy relationship between a bullying academic husband and a resentful wife. The don agrees to have his brain taken out so it can live on after his ...”

“... postage stamp. Confusingly, the photographs span forty years and are left to speak for themselves. William Strudwick’s ‘Old London’ shots taken in the 1860s show much that had disappeared by Booth’s time: medieval coaching inns and the Lambeth riverside that was destroyed by the Albert Embankment, for instance. In the 1870s John Thomson’s portraits ...”

“... symbolically locked the doors of the Jacobin Club. ‘This woman could close the gates of Hell,’ William Pitt said. She was still only twenty.The mood after the Terror was hectic, a combination of relief and post-traumatic shock. All three women were in difficulties. Térézia was famous but broke. Her husband had made off with most of her dowry and Tallien ...”

“... R&B singer Barry White and radical artists such as Archie Shepp, Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba. In William Klein’s Festival panafricain d’Alger 1969, Shepp can be seen on stage with some Touareg musicians. Ted Joans, introducing him, shouts, ‘Jazz is a Black Power!’ ‘We are all Africans,’ Makeba declares to applause. ‘Some are scattered around ...”

“... of all the doctors themselves ... my father’s colleagues lived from month to month on whatever cash their patients provided and did a lot of their work free, not that they wanted to or felt any conscious sense of charity, but because that was the way it was.’ These are considerations to keep in mind; and when, in countries lacking a national health ...”

“... your home as a volatile asset. The canny speculator should be alert for the optimum moment to cash in. Three-bed flats are on offer at £750,000. The average rent in the street is calculated at £1666 per month. Inspired by this febrile vision, householders dig. There are seven basement excavations in progress. Wilberforce Road is unlisted and schemes for ...”