“... 1718 showed them making things up as they went along, and claiming to be new incarnations of the Lord of Heaven, or even of the Holy Spirit. Another intriguing episode, and one with the argument about language at its root, is the suicide in 1628 of Nicolas Trigault. The affair was hushed up, and indeed goes unmentioned in Trigault’s entry in a standard ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The argument and controversy about the Jewish presence in Ireland which ensued in these years when Home Rule seemed a serious possibility were essentially about Ireland itself, about whether the new society should become closed and Catholic and conservative. It is not a coincidence that the riots in the Abbey Theatre about the portrayal of Irish womanhood in ...”

“... seven. In the Criminal Law Act of 1977 they were further reduced to three. Meanwhile, in 1973, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, by an Order in the law vacation, had struck out the ancient practice of listing the occupations of jurors summoned onto the panel. Two further measures were taken in the compendious 1977 Criminal ...”

“... here. ‘When he had contracted to bring on a play,’ Murphy stiffly reports, ‘he would go home rather late from a tavern, and would, the next morning, deliver a scene to the players written upon the papers, which had wrapped the tobacco, in which he so much delighted.’ (In The Grub-Street Opera, ‘Sir Owen, smoking’, soliloquises about the ...”

“... abdicated king sometimes drank too much. A writ was served and the action heard before the Lord Chief Justice, who declared in court that ‘these particular libels, a jury might think, appear almost to invite a thoroughly efficient horse-whipping.’ Author and publisher escaped the lash and merely had to pulp their book and pay huge damages. The ...”

“... it be a Tudor villa on the bypass or a bomb-proof chalet at Berchtesgaden, there’s no place like home.’ As age succeeds to age one kind of inconvenience gives way to another, from smoky Norman halls to the stark artistic interiors of the ‘First Russian Ballet Period’. Meanwhile in the ‘Ordinary Cottage’ a comfortable soul, with her kettle on the ...”

“... she reciprocated by sending him Flower’s love-letters to read. ‘You must marry,’ advised Lord Dufferin, ‘but you must never marry because but in spite of being in love. You are far too clever, my dear Margot, not to be helping some man.’ Margot had recently met Asquith, who was already married to a homebody who ‘lives in Hampstead, and has no ...”

“... to character. The tone of The Country Wife is almost echoed when pretty Beltzi Kurlander writes home to her busy old husband in Warsaw, telling him what a good girl she has been in fending off the attentions paid her by the young schlimazels on the train to Marienbad. Thus did Margery Pinchwife virtuously tell her old husband: ‘He put the tip of his ...”

“... and government borrowing levels, which nudge people to spend more or save more. As Ian Gilmour, Lord Privy Seal between 1979 and 1981, said, monetarism was ‘the uncontrollable in pursuit of the indefinable’.The ‘wets’ within Thatcher’s own party, of whom Gilmour was one, often described her as an ideologue. Gilmour called his book about her ...”

“... the project of his great history of liberty, his ‘Madonna of the Future’, as he called it, Lord Acton was courting nemesis. For ‘moonlight’ his detractors have tended to read ‘moonshine’. His defenders have countered the impression that he wrote no history by representing that in fact he wrote a good deal; but they are heavily dependent on his ...”

“... more intimidating in its implications – to loathe him for the right reasons. His record as Home Secretary before Her Majesty’s judges is appalling. He has lost a succession of cases to do with prisoners, immigrants and criminal injuries compensation. But his litany of defeats hides more than it reveals. Howard’s tenure at the ...”

“... in whom the dullness and servility of their daily works is redeemed by warmth and eccentricity at home. The senior lawyers, in the manner of Bottom the weaver, have taken the best parts, reading the dramatically perverse will, appearing as guileful advocates in the courts, laying down the principles of business in cases with mysterious names such as the ...”

“... in my childhood, a police spotter on the roof of the Wales Office adjusted his bulletproof vest, a Home Guard veteran in a motorised buggy suppressed a cough and I found myself dreaming about Ivor Gurney, how he’d chosen to sleep out on the Embankment a few months after he’d been discharged. When the second round broke the silence, it set off a car ...”

“... Hammond organ. But Ricks doesn’t write about any of that: instead, he writes about Larkin (‘Home is so sad’). This comes as less of a shock than perhaps it should: the first piece of work here to which Ricks applies his critical microscope at full magnification is not a Dylan song but a poem of Larkin’s, ‘Love Songs in Age’, about an elderly ...”