“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... himself.’ Some of them pick up a ‘friend’ (a friendly term in itself) to take back home ‘to indulge in what we call the finer arts’ – ‘what they are I do not know,’ he says firmly. One gets the sense of these two constables as comparatively humane: daily inhabitants of a gay world whose codes they understand. They seem unlike the ...”

“... that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I didn’t want him gumshoeing around my children, my ex-mistresses, my everything,’ Cornwell said years later. ...”

“... When I go home to the Ayrshire town where I grew up, I’ve noticed in recent years that even the dowdiest and most traditional hotels, where the outer limits of exoticism used to be a round of tinned pineapple on top of a gammon steak, have embraced fusion cuisine. Multicultural eclecticism, from food to fashion, is the norm in today’s Britain, and not just in the big cities ...”

“... her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp.’ And it’s as good as Lord Byron. Take the life of Disraeli, for ‘novelist’ read ‘poet’, and you’ve got an epic about what happened to Byron after he’d recovered from that deadly fever at Missolonghi. Having fought for Greek independence, he falls out of love with the ...”

“... about her having or spending lots of money. Yet she received visits from Lord Longford (she was a friend of his grandson) and Lord Hilton (‘a distant cousin of my mother’), and had a food hamper sent from Fortnum and Mason’s. On their last visit prior to her release, her parents arrived ...”