“... definition of ‘devirgination’. He was one of three of Murray’s readers to scrutinise John Bulwer’s 1650 Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or, the Artificall Changling; between them they submitted more than a thousand slips dealing with words relating to sex and bodily mutilation. The second of the three was an unnamed American living in ...”

“... dispossessed. A ‘new London’ was created, which extended well into the safe Tory areas in Surrey, Kent and Essex. The new authority seemed certain to be Conservative in perpetuity, but just in case it didn’t turn out that way, the Government stripped the London County Council of most of its more crucial functions, control over which passed to the ...”

“... stylistic exercise, like that of a very clever student who had been nourished on a forced diet of John Cleveland, George Barker (The Dead Seagull) and Craig Raine, and who had once heard the plot of a novel by Iris Murdoch. The novel’s characters were indeed Romantic, if by that one means fabulous, fanciful, whimsical, high-flown, etc, as under Roget ...”

“... a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John Piper. Normally, his stained glass seethes, particularly in Coventry Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration. In Westminster though, in a building studded with fanciful ...”

“... one or two good anecdotes, to illustrate his points. There is the tale of Hazlitt’s fight with John Lamb, in the course of a dispute about Holbein and Vandyke. I will quote the version in Benjamin Haydon’s journal: ‘They both became so irritated, they upset the card-table, and seized each other by the throat. In the struggle that ensued, Hazlitt got a ...”

“... In 1959, Getty bought (at a bargain price) Sutton Place, the Duke of Sutherland’s estate in Surrey: mentioned in the Domesday Book and owned for a time by Henry VIII, it was older and more distinguished than Bend’Or’s Eaton. He lived there for the rest of his life. He had no idea of how to act like a peer. At Sutton Place, he enlarged his reputation ...”

“... another high-toned writer, I started journalistic life on the Express, initially the Sunday in John Junor’s long days, then the Daily under Roy Wright. Beaverbrook had been dead by then for ten years. The amiable son, who touchingly refused the title in a spirit of unaffected and perhaps warranted humility, reigned rather than ruled in his place and was ...”

“... contemporaneously. But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the ...”

“... haze, and he finds himself wrapped in the climate of his childhood.’ The smell of Father John Forest being burned in May 1538 makes him recall the (fictional) episode, originally rehearsed in Wolf Hall, in which the ‘what – eight years old?’ (in Wolf Hall ‘nine or so’) Cromwell witnesses the burning of the Lollard Joan Boughton at ...”

“... the main challengers to Labour in Liverpool, but also the main challengers to the Conservatives in Surrey. The difference is that, although they are the most left-wing of the major parties, they are more likely to win in Surrey than in Liverpool. Such is the bizarre asymmetry of British politics. At the moment, this profile ...”

“... the soles of the man’s feet were burned with hot irons. In Ireland, the king’s apparatchik John Tiptoft condemned the Earl of Desmond to death for ‘horrible treasons’, then took custody of the victim’s two young sons, whom he summarily beheaded. Later, Tiptoft claimed everything he’d done had been ‘for the state’.In such an age, prudence ...”

“... a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at ...”

“... last autobiographical intrusion recalls a queer event. Once, walking along a residential road in Surrey, Barker was struck on the arm by an egg, thrown by some unknown person, from an unknown place, with an unknown motive. The egg’s impact left an ‘oval weal on my upper arm about six inches in length with a puffy inflamed centre’ which lasted a ...”

“... for Aston, Birmingham issued the following leaflet: £5 Reward! DESPERATE TORIES WILD LIE. Mr John Strachey writes: ‘It has come to my notice that Tory canvassers are making the outrageous statement that I am a foreigner. This is a most serious allegation which the Aston Tory Party, utterly beaten in political argument, has fallen back upon as a last ...”

“... of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen Wise addressing an anti-Nazi rally; John Galsworthy’s protest about planes being used for war – ‘For the love of the sun, and stars and the blue sky, that have given us all our aspirations since the beginning of time, let us leave the air to innocence!’ ‘The guiding principle,’ says ...”