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“... governments have tried to subdue the Corporation. Mrs Thatcher’s man was said to have been Lord King, privatiser of British Airways, and a highly unsuitable choice that would have been. We have been spared Lord King, who has withdrawn, and rumour has had it that we may be given Lord Barnett instead, someone with no ...”

“... it officially was) practised religious toleration. When Henri duc d’Anjou was elected king in January 1573, only months after tens of thousands of Protestants had been massacred in his native France, he was forced to submit to a resolution which ran: Since there is in our Commonwealth no little disagreement on the subject of religion, in order to ...”

“... the Portuguese colonial governor; it was sent along with a chest-full of precious baubles to the king of Portugal. As with many gifts, there was a diffuse expectation of reciprocity – in this case, the hope that the gesture might forestall a disastrous war with the European power. The rhino was loaded in chains onto a Portuguese ship in Goa and delivered ...”

“... tells much the same story as that given by Elisabeth Murray (Caught in the Web of Words, 1977) and Peter Sutcliffe (in his 1978 ‘informal history’ of OUP), from their biographical and house-historical perspectives. Willinsky’s Murray, however, is less the innocent gnome in his funny hat in the scriptorium at the bottom of the garden in the Banbury ...”

“... knowledge ‘not worth a button’. In Philadelphia, William Cobbett, under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, launched biting satires on the eminent exile’s garbled style and dangerous beliefs. In London, Johnson was long convinced of Priestley’s badness: ‘an evil man, sir, his work unsettles everything yet settles nothing’. Boswell helpfully ...”

“... not appeal to those who find twists in the tail meretricious and prefer the sort which not only peter out but peter in. Yet it is impossible not to admire the craftsmanship, the precision, the unerring selection of the right asp from the basket to do the lethal job. As Self says, ‘Arresting metaphor follows terse ...”

“... in these pains … as one who has found great treasures.’ After her breasts are cut off, St Peter heals them (over her protests) so that she can survive to face new torments. A kind of double vision is required of the spectator: where pagan kings and their minions see only unbearable pain, martyrs experience the invisible power of God. Their legends ...”

“... organisation, possibly founded by Churchill during World War Two? What did Deza’s mentor, Sir Peter Wheeler (modelled on the Oxford professor Sir Peter Russell), do during the Spanish Civil War? And what about the bloodstain on his stairs? What is being set up by the narrator’s constant outing of ‘bogus ...”

“... of these Russian billionaires had wined and dined European and American leaders and officials. Peter Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and George Osborne, the future chancellor, spent some time on the aluminium mogul Oleg Deripaska’s yacht Queen K off the coast of Corfu in 2008. Queen K, later renamed Clio and now renamed Altair, was in the ...”

“... of that, and the Express in particular is down on its luck. In the days of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, the Mirror was a wonder to us all – slick, successful and serious about its politics. Its journalists and layout men buzzed round Hugh Gaitskell, seeking to burnish the Labour Party’s shabby image. Now, in 1987, Captain Maxwell does his best when not ...”

“... their language, distorted how they looked at the world and at themselves. Yet, as both Judd and Peter Marshall demonstrate, neither Parliament nor the public ever gave Empire much conscious and sustained attention except when things were going hideously wrong and/or when they themselves were directly involved. Thus there were English colonies in America ...”

“... McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they think they do.) At a Christmas lunch at the Mirabelle for his Mirror columnists, Morgan remembers ecstatically how ...”

“... wife. ‘Now we shall never know.’ The regular scenario for many of Barry’s jokes concerned St Peter at the gates of Heaven, so that when he finally arrived there last month it can have been no surprise.24 February. One doubtful blessing of my new and sophisticated hearing aids is that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the ...”

“... up in the Thirties – in my case, in the late Thirties. I arrived at Westminster School, as a King’s Scholar, in September 1936. The King’s Scholars lived in a house of their own called College, and I looked forward to the experience. For the reality I turned out to be totally unprepared. I was a prig. I was ...”

“... imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem ...”