“... the son thrives rather than starves in foreign parts. It further supposes that when he returns home, his father does not immediately recognise him as he runs to meet him and shower him with gifts. Instead, blinded by cupidity, the father sees only a wealthy stranger ripe for the picking. He murders his son, and only later discovers what he has done: he ...”

“... moralistic William Haley, the rather prissy William Rees-Mogg, or the crusading Charles Douglas-Home. Paul Dacre, on the other hand, isn’t just ‘rather different’ from these three. He is entirely different, belonging to a category of journalism quite distinct from theirs. Not only is it tabloid in the sense of being aimed at a mass readership: it is ...”

“... documentary ‘Dear Bill’ letters, or you can despair, gnash your teeth and rail against the Lord for culpable laziness when he got round to inventing humankind. He was, perhaps, boiling an egg at the time. I’m inclined towards teeth-gnashing, but aspire to being a more balanced person, so I alternated reading the Denis Thatcher story with a rereading ...”

“... figure in the pantheon of Tory leaders? What is best known about him is that he is ‘unknown’. Lord Blake’s celebrated biography, The Unknown Prime Minister (1955), took its cue from Asquith’s perhaps apocryphal remark at Bonar Law’s funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1923: it was fitting, Asquith said, to ‘have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by ...”

“... Florence soon wearied of Savonarola. Jonathan Edwards, preaching God’s wrath in the 1730s in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought his congregation to paroxysms of weeping, despair and repentance, but after the ‘great awakening’ had spread through the region and made him internationally famous, he found that the people of Northampton ...”

“... its Jebusite inhabitants and proclaimed it his capital, he danced in his exaltation ‘before the Lord with all his might … girded with a linen ephod’ – the sort of apron priests wore and so not appropriate for kings. This was a sure sign that he had got religion with a vengeance. Michal, one of his wives, ‘looked through a window, and saw King David ...”

“... it. They’re rotten.’Hill’s rancour was directed particularly at the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, who in 1980 had ruled against the Birmingham Six’s civil action for assault against West Midlands Police, which essentially implicated the officers in perjury. Denning considered this ‘such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the ...”

“... the first on any topic for 14 years. ‘We were,’ says the report, ‘unusually, asked by the Home Secretary to report within two years, and this we have done.’ The Commission has inspected the terrain in detail, from the inefficient design of many modern courtrooms – promoting orthopaedic trauma in jurors, the unnerving of witnesses and much else ...”

“... in relation to Nelson and his lions. At almost 16 feet high, the giant fibreglass rooster was lord of all he surveyed. The plinth’s latest occupant, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (until March 2020), is the work of the Chicago-based sculptor Michael Rakowitz. He has resurrected one of the world’s most impressive sculptural creations, the massive ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... rich and famous for very good reasons. ‘Our idea,’ he writes, ‘of an enjoyable night at home was to get on the phone to rich and famous people whose numbers we knew . . . pretending to be the Water Board, and ask them to turn on all their cold taps because there was a “build-up in pressure” under their house, with a risk of explosion.’ He ...”

“... the sporadic but endless killings in Northern Ireland begins no later than 24 December 1601, when Lord Mountjoy’s forces defeated Hugh O’Neill’s at the battle of Kinsale. After the ‘flight of the earls’ to the Continent in 1607 the way was clear for the confiscation of land throughout the country. There was a particular plan for the North. In 1610 ...”

“... Europe into a crisis of failed harvests, mass hunger and widespread social unrest. In Britain, Lord Liverpool’s government had suspended Habeas Corpus; Luddite organisers, revolutionary Spenceans and radical journalists had been arrested and tried (with mixed results); the Peterloo Massacre and the repressive ‘Six Acts’ lay just ahead. Windermere ...”

“... directors quickly took their place in the local unionist establishment: one of them explained to Lord Reith that ‘our position here will be strengthened immensely if we can persuade the Northern [Irish] government to look upon us as their mouthpiece.’ Radio broadcasts steered clear of the fact that Northern Ireland contained a large nationalist ...”

“... Stanley), was hired by Greensill while working for the civil service. The former Met Police chief Lord Bernard Hogan-Howe was a paid adviser for Greensill while he was acting as a non-executive director of the Cabinet Office. Francis Maude, another member of the House of Lords, has also been drawn into the scandal: he was Cabinet Office minister when the ...”