“... extreme left, at a slightly lower level, stands his only surviving son and heir, the ten-year-old Lord Blandford. Each of them is shown gesturing to the other, presumably because the artist wanted to create a connection in the spectator’s mind between the author of the family’s grandeur and the source of its future hopes. But the effect is to carry the ...”

“... of Emma Tennant’s Queen of Stones, you must first imagine that Virginia Woolf has rewritten Lord of the Flies. Interior monologues and painfully acute perceptions of a seaside landscape combine to colour in what is essentially a tale of a group of girls wrecked on a desert island. The fact that the desert island is just off the coast of Dorset, and has ...”

“... thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’ Holmes’s dictum is cited by Lord Steyn in a significant recent decision on prisoners’ rights as the third of four reasons for placing a high value on freedom of speech. The first is that freedom of speech is important for its own sake: this I take to mean that it is important to everyone ...”

“... it was exhibited at Windsor.) There were also some alarming attempts at cross-breeding. In 1773, Lord Robert Clive was determined that his zebra mare should mate with an ass. The zebra ‘shewed great disgust’ but Clive persevered: the ass was painted with stripes, ‘whereupon she accepted him’. (The mule that resulted from this union was said to be ...”

“... idol, Ronald Firbank.’ They co-authored five ponderously Firbankian novels, camply titled Lord Cucumber, The Silver Bucket, The Mechanical Womb, The Last Days of Sodom and The Boy Hairdresser. None ever made it into print. Between Us Girls, however, is a funny and colloquial diary novel in three sections, detailing the adventures of a young London ...”

“... thirty years if a gun is involved). Ferguson got 22 years. Many, including Sir Anthony Hooper, a Lord Justice of Appeal until 2012, have serious misgivings about the use of joint enterprise. ‘The doctrine is too wide and should be limited so that only a person who intends to kill or cause grievous bodily harm is guilty of murder,’ Hooper told me. ‘A ...”

“... In 1938 he went as a student to France – still thinking to study medicine – but he returned home the following year committed to literature and philology. When the war started, Czernowitz was occupied first by Russian troops and then by the Germans and their Romanian allies. The Antschels were put in a ghetto and got out of it, but in the summer of 1942 ...”

“... has cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. In an interview with the Sunday Times in October 2005, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Scotland’s larger-than-life lord advocate from 1989 to 1992, questioned the reliability of the shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the prosecution’s star witness. ‘Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I ...”

“... or financial favours. ‘I have been in the hands of the police,’ one young adventurer wrote home to his ‘Pa’, ‘or rather the other way round, the police have been in my hands so many times lately that my lily white hands have been trembling, and I am utterly fucked out.’ (If the word ‘Pa’ is to be taken literally, the youth must have had an ...”

“... as —”’ was how the Marquess’s offending calling-card appeared in the Evening Standard. Lord Queensberry’s ‘Somdomite’ was displaying his characteristic ineffability by causing the tongue to stumble and producing gaps in public discourse. In recent years, some would argue, those gaps have been filled to overflowing. Lesbian articles, queer ...”

“... began to trundle back in February, when the judges were announced. Whoever wins the Booker takes home £9000 less than the winner of the Orange Prize, ‘the UK’s largest and richest annual book award for fiction’, for which the shortlist is to be announced today (10 May). There’s always a certain amount of fuss about whether or not it’s fair to ...”

“... the bogey-man in chief. In 1996, in a report which was otherwise sympathetic to the authorities, Lord Lloyd of Berwick called for a reform in the law to allow such evidence to be led in national security cases. Not only did the government reject this view, it re-enacted the prohibition in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. With the introduction ...”

“... dark days when Churchill vowed we would fight them on the beaches,’ the Daily Express said. The lord chancellor, above the prime minister in the constitutional order of precedence, has a special responsibility to defend the judiciary. The office has customarily been held by senior lawyers in the twilight of their careers, people who could resist the ...”

“... that had endured since at least the start of the 15th century. When in 1487 Ahuizotl, the lord or Chief Speaker of Tenochtitlan, celebrated the completion of the most recent enlargement of the pyramid temple of Huitzilopochtli, he devised a spectacle in which for four long days thousand of captives and slaves were forced to climb its steps, there to ...”

“... of the battlefield registered civilian consequences elsewhere, and the ways in which people back home chose not to forget. The battalions of soldiers who fought at Gallipoli came from somewhere, and returned to somewhere: Moorhouse, a Lancastrian whose grandfather fought in the campaign, chooses one regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, and its ...”