“... Yet our Blairite interim house has about 600 members and the fully reformed one proposed by Lord Wakeham would have 550 (with no statutory upper limit on its numbers). Only the Italian Senate with 326 would approach this. The worldwide norm is for the upper house to be much smaller than the lower – on average about 60 per cent of its ...”

“... and slipped in the violence of their endeavours; drill and auger jolted and shook as they struck home, stuck in bedrock, and could not shake free. The body of the whole began to heave and shudder as if it sought relief from its own intentions. Benjamin Markovits, The Syme Papers Poor Bunbury died this afternoon. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being ...”

“... him to the Russian desk. There he stole a huge library of MI5 secrets which he stored in his home. He was only caught when he tried to stuff some of the juiciest of these into the letter box of the Second Secretary of the Russian Embassy. Confused by this latest excess of British Intelligence, the secretary immediately shopped Bettaney to his ...”

“... carried all before her, she is now silent when not absent, but on the steps of her Eaton Square home, with Kurdish children clinging to her skirts, three sentences of Thatcherite imperatives mocked with their rhetorical certainty the serviceable prose of her successor and chided him to the most dramatic initiative of his premiership. Her voice rings as if ...”

“... a shorter version was big enough. Sometimes top-paying American magazines, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, would ask for his new novel, to run it as a ‘one-shotter’: sixty-five thousand words cut to twenty-five thousand as a complete story, in one issue, while the novel was fresh in the bookshops in hardback. Wodehouse did the job and he produced a ...”

“... He wants to tell his father, a lorry driver who’s often away for long periods but has returned home unexpectedly, but he keeps missing his chance – until he suddenly suspects that his father may in fact have something to do with the horror in the pit. So it’s partly with relief, and partly with fear, that Michele discovers il Teschio’s older ...”

“... full of allusions to fashionable figures, and elaborately interested in its own making. The home product, by contrast, is solid and deep, staunchly unaware that there are any other cultural products in the world, and firmly convinced that the art which conceals art is the next best thing to having no art at all. On my left, Umberto Eco; on my right ...”

“... at first then strengthened in appearance. She stooped before Rama, greeting him thus, ‘May the Lord bless your feet, you are Rama. I have endured years this lonely way.’ The Sage twigged on to the miracle unveiling, He took the boys aside and told them Ahalya’s story. ‘Rama, this ideal beauty is Ahalya. Formed by the gods then raised here on earth by ...”

“... after Nonnus I Her only home was here in this forest, among the high rocks, sending her long arrows in flight through the standing pines as if threading nets in the air. She’d never seen a cup of wine or a perfumed room, or a bed: she drank chill water from the mountain brook and had only ever lain with lionesses, newly delivered of their cubs, who licked her hard white body, whimpering there like dogs ...”

“... Matthiessen had an exciting time as a student abroad. He wrote to an old girlfriend back home: ‘Our existence here continues in its usual extraordinary fashion – full, exciting, extremely stimulating and amusing, and very tiring indeed.’ To his journal he confided: ‘Would like to narrow social life down to N and P Southgate or somebody like ...”

“... repelled by his deformity. Shardlake’s first sidekick, Mark Poer, is twittish, something of a Lord Percy to his Blackadder, but represents both the son he’ll never have and a masculine ideal he can’t measure up to. Poer’s face is smooth where Shardlake’s is angular, his hair cropped where Shardlake’s is floppy. Poer has a two-foot-long ...”

“... Weather’, ‘Breakfast in Summer’, ‘Getting Up on Cold Mornings’ and ‘Walks Home by Night’. Such pieces generally began with a description of an everyday physical experience that would have been common to all, regardless of class or condition. And once this common ground had been established, the essay would wander off, often in the ...”

“... Charles Reade led a strenuous campaign in the Daily Telegraph which successfully pushed the Home Secretary into remitting the sentence. Riots were feared in Liverpool after the conspicuously unsound conviction and death sentence passed on Florence Maybrick in 1889; but executions generally fed a public appetite. Twenty thousand people went to watch ...”

“... is a divorcé.’ Then when he became prime minister in 1957 he replaced Poole with Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham), who was another one. Hailsham had come home from the war to find his wife sleeping with an aide-de-camp to De Gaulle. Her guilt was unambiguous; so was her husband’s innocence. Hailsham’s experience of ...”

“... an exemplary job of demolition, made all the more convincing by his generous willingness to regard Lord Longford as something better than a buffoon. Commendably ready to hold an opinion no matter who agrees with him, Levin finds himself siding with Lord Longford over the matter of Myra Hindley. ‘In this matter,’ he ...”