“... be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and Hobbes, who knew Donne, may have had the poet’s image in mind. Bramhall almost certainly did, taking Donne’s account of the conspiracy of the swordfish and the thresher fish against the ...”

“... but probably also to distance himself from an episode of family humiliation: in Joseph Knight v. John Wedderburn, an enslaved man had successfully sued his owner, James Wedderburn’s brother, winning his freedom and forming a precedent that made life difficult for slave owners in Scotland. Andrew Colvile wrote to Bell’s claiming that his father had ...”

“... There was never any question of the three defendants (the journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the former signals corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any information to ‘the enemy’ – except (an important qualification) insofar as the British Security Services have always regarded the British ...”

“... in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as their ...”

“... the Holy Grail for the Knights Not Round the Table – Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Sir Bill Cash, Sir John Redwood et al – and they have devoted their adult lives to it. But they have more in mind than this. They hope also to undo the constitutional and administrative reforms of the Blair years. What they want to achieve is a simplification of democracy. The ...”

“... From an elevated and distant position the queen looks down approvingly, her loyal ghillie John Brown, leader of the queen’s pony, at her side. John Grant, the head keeper at Balmoral, is on his knees in shirtsleeves, one hand on the stag’s antlers, while the other reaches for his sgian-dubh, with which he will ...”

“... the drawing room – and sat me by a different fireplace and an old but different desk – was John Macfie, a tall and whiskery gentleman who lives there with his family. He poured me a whisky before sitting down in a red armchair beside the darkened windows. ‘At the front, in Louis’s bedroom, you get the punctuation of street noise,’ he ...”

“... as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... except Donald Trump … would grant access to the editor of the National Enquirer.’The Blair/Campbell secular benediction ‘the People’s Princess’ was surprisingly more than a slogan: Diana pre-empted the media, the conduit to the people. She got over being described as a Pinner hairdresser, just as Kate Middleton had to put up with some crass digs ...”

“... for example – were quickly pushed aside. Instead, architects and planners (including Jock Campbell, the plantation-owner-turned-socialist who led the corporation for 15 years) accepted that new town inhabitants would drive cars, commute, live in breadwinner/housewife domestic units, and have material and aesthetic aspirations. Milton Keynes was, in ...”

“... Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for ...”

“... is a chained-up bear: half-size, scraggly and dull in the eyes, kept alive on dog food. Homer Campbell, who runs the general store upriver and sells limp carrots to the locals, tells Lou there has always been one on the estate. As keeper of the house, as investigator of its long line of owners, it will also be her duty to care for this ...”

“... scattered collections – made by Marion Scott, the Gurney family, Ivor’s Gloucester friend John Haines, Vaughan Williams and others – into a central archive. The process continued after Finzi’s death in 1956. Neither Gurney nor Scott had bothered much about dates and the habit of confusion grew by amalgamation. Blunden, returning manuscripts ...”

“... Administration. The great cult film of all time in this respect is George Axelrod’s and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, withdrawn from circulation after the Kennedy assassination but now available again in cassette form. And the great artistic and emblematic coincidence of the movie is the playing of the good guy by Frank Sinatra ...”