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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Why I went I can’t think – the volume was some piece of unreadable bufferdom extruded by Lord Butler, who as ‘Rab’ had never in his life done anything to live down the Greek Street sobriquet ‘flabby-faced old coward’. He himself was vaguely present, moving about the carpet like a terrible tortoise. A sprinkling of hacks and politicos ...”

“... to know about Nancy, but leaves out her charm, which was ‘such that we all fell easy victims’, Lord Brand wrote when he first met her. It must have been colossal to make her friends put up with some of the qualities in Fox’s inventory, not to speak of her relentless interference in their affairs. Phyllis gets no ‘character’ subsection in the ...”

“... understand; lest haply they should turn again, and it should be forgiven them’. Kermode drives home that this means he is ‘telling stories in order to ensure that they will miss the point.’ The disciples ask about the parable of the Sower, and Jesus indignantly explains: ‘the sower soweth the word.’ But this is an unusually pointless allegory. Does ...”

“... letters and the world of Society, lunched with Browning and dined with Matthew Arnold, and visited Lord This and Lady That and the Honourable Whatshisname. The Hardy that we have at the end of the volume is a prosperous, middle-aged English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works of, say, Edmund Gosse, or Walter Besant. But a career is not a ...”

“... The late Lord Caccia, who had the misfortune to arrive in Washington as British Ambassador in November 1956 just as the ‘special relationship’ hit its all-time low with the abrupt American-driven ceasefire on the Suez Canal, was much given in later years to recalling how flabbergasted he had been by an encounter he witnessed on the 17th of that month ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sketched out for the 16-year-old Viscount Althorp, Jones’s pupil and future patron, who became home secretary after his death. The tensions and paradoxes of patronage culture mark Jones’s entire career, nowhere more than in his dealings with Althorp and the Spencer family. The grandson of an Anglesey sheep farmer, Jones was never exactly poor: his father ...”