“... room, smiling at her as he had smiled in the Exchequer House.She cried out in feigned alarm: ‘My lord . . . what means this?’He smiled. As though she did not know! But he enjoyed the masquerade as much as she did. Of late she had perhaps been overeager, and a certain amount of resistance had always appealed to him. So she protested but her heart was not in ...”

“... to outdo all autodidacts. His next, barely more palatable option was to join his elder brother James in his Boston printing works. Josiah had whipped Benjamin regularly, and now James beat him too, for smuggling saucy comment pieces into the New-England Courant under the alias of a worthy widow called Silence Dogood ...”

“... Wedderburn wrote to Bell’s because he was evidence that such rumours were true. His father, James Wedderburn, had been a prominent Scottish plantation owner and his mother, Rosanna, a member of the domestic staff on Wedderburn’s Jamaican plantation when she twice became pregnant by him. Rosanna went out of her way to make ...”

“... the buildings it was required to list and describe had to have been erected before 1714. In 1911 Lord Curzon intervened with his own money to save Tattershall Castle from vandals who had ripped out the medieval fireplaces (on which Pugin had modelled those of the Houses of Parliament) and disposed of the building itself to a dealer for export to America. But ...”

“... a saint that the executioners cut off his head. The litany of holy violence culminates in St James the Dismembered, whose legend could have inspired an episode in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Slain finger by finger and toe by toe, this martyr responds to the loss of each digit with a Bible verse or a prayer. Only when the 27th stroke has severed his ...”

“... or less in at the birth of the game. Mary, Queen of Scots was said to be as keen on it as her son, James, who played at Blackheath when he came south to inherit the crown. Private clubs remained sticky about women becoming members, but might permit them to play inconspicuously at off-peak hours. At Muirfield, the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers allowed ...”

“... his sisters in October 1939, whereas Winston was ‘enjoying every moment of the war’. As for Lord Halifax, no shrinking violet in political argument, the thought of being a war leader made him feel sick. Equally important, however, were the limits of Churchill’s military experience. He had charged with the cavalry at Omdurman and led hazardous patrols ...”

“... that comes from having had a glittering career at the forefront of tearful simplicity. ‘Good Lord,’ she says of AnnieLee, now singing for beers and fries at the Cat’s Paw Saloon, ‘that girl’s so gorgeous she could sing like a barn cat in heat and folks’ll be calling her the next Maria Callas.’AnnieLee goes back to her alter ego’s mansion in ...”

“... of the backpacking generation’. Not all ladies have become women. In a chapter here on P.D. James, Martin Priestman records her distrust of ambitious professional women, approval of loyal housekeepers and disdain for people who say ‘toilet’ when they mean ‘lavatory’. At one point she feels the need to remind herself that not everyone wants to ...”

“... gallows, as is clear from this volume of last speeches edited by the indefatigable Irish historian James Kelly. The speech from the gallows, along with the sermon, the sectarian pamphlet, the tall tale, the statement from the dock, the denunciation from the church altar and the address from the hustings, are among the most venerable of Irish literary ...”

“... On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt ...”

“... jurisdictions cease.’ It had, according to Coke in 1615, ‘the survey of all other courts’. Lord Chancellor Ellesmere sought to resist this assertion, contending that the Royal Council, not the King’s Bench, was the ‘chief watch tower for all points of misgovernment’, but a series of assertive chief justices (notably Popham, Fleming and Coke) had ...”

“... Rex v. Edmonds and ensuing appeal (1820, 1821), and to several Chartist cases in 1848. Father James O’Coigly, a Catholic priest, was a United Irishman who, sometimes disguised as ‘Captain Jones’ was travelling in England in the year of the Irish rebellion, as courier to the ‘Jacobin’ underground. With Arthur O’Connor and others, he was ...”

“... The first Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England was Charles Russell, in 1894, a man whose benignly Victorian image looked down on me almost every day of my teenage life. He was by a long way my Dublin secondary school’s most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall ...”

“... dazzling ‘Tilling’ comedies, and has, further, been said of the later writings of Henry James. But Benson couldn’t understand the latter, didn’t like them, and strongly disapproved of the treacherous cult of young acolytes like Hugh Walpole and Percy Lubbock who lit incense at the feet of the master. ‘Life’s nothing – unless heroic and ...”