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“... trial made the same journey in a minibus escorted by ten police motorbikes. The trial judge, Lord Beckett, lawyers, court staff and Packer, now 51, wearing a mask and walking with a stick, were there too. They went off the track and into the woods to the stream where Caldwell was found. I had been almost persuaded of Packer’s guilt by the police ...”

“... the political control which the Prime Minister insisted was being exercised over the Royal Navy. Lord Lewin, incumbent Chief of the Defence Staff in 1982, has described how the War Cabinet came to authorise the mid-April retaking of South Georgia: this provided its own evidence of the way a confident military establishment was able to impose its will on an ...”

“... begins the day by calling routinely upon his cousin and master, the Earl of Sandwich, but his lord is not yet up. So what’s to do? ‘I went out to Charing cross, to sec Major-Generall Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered – which was done there – he looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition’ It was powerful street theatre: the ...”

“... Labour’s Scottish stronghold. It was unseemly, however, to express such sentiments in the raw. Home Rule was a momentous constitutional reform, and New Labour’s radicalism in this area was to be properly celebrated as such (not least because this drew attention away from the new government’s timid adherence to Conservative spending limits). Nor was ...”

“... runs over his gloved hand. He’s no scientist but he knows the words of Ecclesiastes: The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them. In the lab back home in Indiana, his friend the chemist will analyse these gentle scrapings of soil and spoor, isolate a new microbe, and ...”

“... shrill things: What do you mean? What do you mean? I can’t. Come on. God. How does she fare at home? Well, she prepared a variety cut for her supper, not a regular cut. It was a beef heart – the largest and least tender of these cuts. She sliced it very thin and then fried. Later she squeezed the proper measure of hand cream into the palm of her hand and ...”

“... with Tahu and Nelly Rhodes who, when in New Zealand, had been among her closest friends. Nelly is Lord Plunket’s eldest daughter, and the family are depicted as the aristocratic Lampreys in the detective story Surfeit of Lampreys. Her view of English society is formed by this first encounter, and persists throughout her novels – to their detriment, it ...”

“... he can be both just and kind, suggesting that his motives for taking the seven women into his home were not wholly base ones. (His congregation, of course, believe that he is simply carrying out the will of the Lord.) Martha learns to read and pray, and Hannah, under Leah’s and Joanna’s instruction, learns to be ...”

“... Common wealth sovereignty’ – how she could have seen it as anything else he does not explain. Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, who was Urban’s patron at the Court of Queen Margaret, disagreed with this regal dissent and invited Urban to listen to a debate in the House of Lords on Grenada, in which he was going to speak. In this debate, ‘Wayland Young (...”

“... and explosives. The IRA commanders also appear to have become over-confident. The killing of Lord Justice Gibson, number two in the Northern Ireland judiciary, and his wife, and the almost daily grenade, mortar and rifle attacks on RUC/British Army bases, had given the IRA their most successful four months since the late Seventies, when they killed ...”

“... Great Cause (overseen by Edward I of England) were soon established as Robert de Brus, fifth lord of Annandale, and John Balliol, lord of Galloway. Both claims originated in the marriages of the daughters of David, earl of Huntingdon, the youngest grandson of David I of Scotland. Balliol had a claim by ...”

“... after winning a crucial censure vote in the Commons at three in the morning, the octogenarian Lord Palmerston ran up the stairs to the Ladies’ Gallery to embrace his wife, who had been present throughout. In 1867, after the successful passage of the Reform Act, Disraeli returned home, where Mary Anne was waiting up ...”

“... Stuart Little, The Secret Garden, The Borrowers, The Little Prince, Member of the Wedding, Gigi, Lord of the Flies, Return of the Native … This is Willa, the 15-year-old narrator of Early Disorder, looking at her bookshelf and wondering if you are what you read. Notice that there are children’s books and adult books, and nothing in between. Nothing, in ...”

“... Bonham Carter, who ‘as it happens’ is a cousin of Glenconner’s late husband, Colin Tennant (Lord Glenconner), coming for tea and taking copious notes. It was at this moment, as she tried to recall useful details such as the princess’s smoking style (‘rather like a Chinese tea ceremony’) that she began to consider writing about her own life. She is ...”

“... ten, was a college tutor. In due course the boys went away to public school, while I was taught at home by my mother, generally alongside one or two other children of Cambridge dons. In that exceptional environment, far from intellectual interests being suppressed, I was driven by her to reading books way beyond the interests and competence appropriate to my ...”