“... John Fisher for ‘R.P. Johannes Phischerius’. Foreign, too, is the Anglican ring of ‘My Lord Bishop’ (for ‘Reverendissime Praesul’). Saddest of all, that syncretism which led pious Renaissance Christians to apply to God the revered titles of Antiquity disappears without a trace. ‘Christ our Saviour’ really is desperately far from ...”

“... from the story of the Fall – but the square panel over his head must be a version of ‘Then the Lord answered Job out of the Whirlwind.’ (It combines and condenses elements of Blake’s previous engraving of the subject.) As so often in Blake, the balance between positive and negative in the scene as a whole is precarious: Job is central and patriarchal ...”

“... with ash from her untipped Gauloise dropping into the paella. One friend called her ‘a sort of Lord Chesterfield of food’ but she was more of a Gertrude Jekyll. She reinvented cookery on Arts and Crafts lines as Jekyll reinvented gardening, taking a craft that came dangerously close to manual labour and transforming it into a liberal art. The same thing ...”

“... through which might be glanced seething horrors.’ He is ushered towards them by Jethro Swai-Phillips, a lawyer who, with his shirtless copper torso, afro and wraparound sunglasses, brings an astonishingly physical sense of psychic intrusion. Tom felt the hairs rise on his neck – and even his arms. He began to sweat. It was as if the … man had ...”

“... Arthur Balfour, who set him on the path of writing thrillers by introducing him to those of E. Phillips Oppenheim, jokily described by Buchan as ‘the greatest Jewish writer since Isaiah’ – and to the sympathetically depicted Jewish characters who crop up here and there in his fiction. As the Unionist MP for the Combined Scottish Universities, he ...”

“... new novels were given full-page advertisements, was engaged in Allied propaganda in America; E. Phillips Oppenheim conducted neutral journalists round the Western Front; Baroness Orczy founded a women’s Active Service League to hound slackers; and so on. What was to be Rider Haggard’s war work? By mid-1915 he had seen his vision: a grand post-war plan ...”

“... Lord Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, single shareholder in the late lamented Millennium Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator who appeared to be crouching on the floor of his chauffeured limousine as he drifted across London; and who remained, within earshot of an eavesdropped soliloquy, while the real PM perched in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt spoon-removers, young men who read newspapers for him and blunt Irish fixers chewing on unrequired advice ...”

“... abstracting mythographers and anthropologists are here recorded in all their material reality. Mrs Phillips suddenly engulfed in fire during burning-off, Bert pushing her under water in the soak, and nearly being knocked out for his troubles by her husband who saw only what looked like death by water, not escape from the flames. Young Bert, flogged within ...”

“... of years old, though just how many millions was unclear. Darwin had suggested 300 million, John Phillips a mere 96 million; the physicist Lord Kelvin initially suggested a billion years based on a projected rate of cooling, but later reduced his estimate to forty or fifty thousand. The discovery of radioactivity in the ...”

“... linear, solipsistic way of thinking’. Surely this is overstated: the letters of Jane Austen or Lord Byron are quite as dash-sprinkled as Sancho’s. Equiano’s autobiography and Sancho’s letters, both recently reprinted, are worth recovering, and have had a powerful influence on black British authors. Sandhu notes that several of the contemporary ...”

“... his villain a Labour intellectual who becomes a life peer and bears the transparent soubriquet of Lord Frost. And yet the modern intelligence services owed at one time a considerable debt to the writers of spy stories – in particular to William Le Queux and Phillips Oppenheim. Le Queux’s hero, Duckworth Drew, whose name ...”

“... could become his medium after he died, as did Louise Owen, secretary to the newspaper owner Lord Northcliffe. In her essay on this early and oddly literal version of the ‘secretary to the stars’ phenomenon, Bette London describes how Owen tried to appropriate the immense popular power of her late employer. ‘You know I am as active here as on earth ...”

“... In 1954, at the trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for homosexuality, the counsel for the prosecution, G.D. ‘Khaki’ Roberts (‘fruity-voiced, with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself ...”

“... masquerade. Davie’s Essays in Dissent brings together his Clark Lectures for 1976 and his Ward-Phillips Lectures for 1980, adding seven more pieces on related topics, notably ‘A Day with the DNB’, ‘Dissenters and “Antiquity” ’ and ‘Disaffection of the Dissenters under George III’. The book adds up to the biography of a lost strain of ...”

“... had crashed to earth at Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Professor Pierson and his interviewer, Carl Phillips, were speeding to the scene. Thus began a 57-minute experiment on mass opinion in America. Carl Phillips was obviously the sort of brave reporter who would die at his post rather than deny his listeners a break in a ...”