“... proposal of marriage, when Vera declines it, is followed by a punch in the face. Vera takes up secret residence in the closed-down hotel, alone with the confusion of her thoughts. ‘All her life she had wanted to do something in her hometown without being judged.’ The idea occurs to her, as it must, only when she realises its impossibility. The small ...”

“... every unpaid chairmanship in England’, and running a successful practice as a solicitor, is a secret Lord Goodman refrains from revealing. Energy and physical strength (despite the obesity he makes several jokes about) were obvious preconditions of his style of life. A generous desire to help his suppliants, at the cost of his own peace, was ...”

“... a day. Jyoti Basu, the astringent, unsmiling Communist chief minister of West Bengal, a barrister from London and a bhadralok (that is, a member of the liberal, patrician middle class), whose first name means ‘light’, began to be called Andhakaar, or ‘Darkness’. Bombay, on the other hand, began to dazzle; I have no memory of it ever not ...”

“... paper’s first lead review was of More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, done by Augustine Birrell, a barrister, a Liberal MP, and the author of a volume of essays entitled Obiter Dicta. The first poem was by Harold Begbie. It was an anthem for Empire, and May succinctly describes it as ‘rather an absurd poem’. English studies, as an academic ...”

“... topics: Labour Party infighting and malfeasance by British Muslims. Both cases were heard by the barrister Richard Mawrey, sitting as election commissioner, a man not shy of expressing strong opinions and with a knack for the headline-friendly phrase. In the Birmingham case, in 2005, Mawrey found six Labour councillors guilty of organising thousands of ...”

“... its first nuclear device, her father, then prime minister, responded ‘immediately’. He held secret talks with China, made a deal of sorts with Libya, struck an agreement with France to purchase a plutonium-reprocessing plant and hired Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist then employed in Holland and now regarded, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as a parent of ...”

“... The Week and its well-placed informants went after them ferociously, breaking news from the secret German opposition and exposing furtive British moves towards a pact with the Third Reich. A special target was Lady Astor, who was antisemitic and violently hostile to both France and Soviet Russia, Britain’s only plausible allies in a war with ...”

“... in the political wilderness for years. This didn’t stop the Met’s Special Branch keeping secret files on all of them.Abbott’s parents, a factory worker and a nurse, were Windrush-generation migrants from Jamaica. Like most of their fellow migrants, they were Labour voters and deeply aspirational. To escape the racism of the rental market, they ...”

“... view, I entirely accept. It has been my experience that most middle-class families have some “secret” of this kind in their midst.’ Ivy Compton-Burnett had published ten novels before the 33-year-old Angus Wilson sat down one Sunday and wrote ‘Raspberry Jam’ – to which he then added seven other short stories at successive weekends. In ...”

“... bicycle. (Cycling also gave him his first breakthrough in journalism: the son of a feckless barrister, he had left school at sixteen to write freelance articles; a Coventry publishing firm made him editor of Bicycling News, then helped him set up Answers to Correspondents.) He bought his first motor car in 1899 and had ten of them by 1911. He got the ...”

“... remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the Allies) that a talk on the USSR by the socialist barrister D.N. Pritt was ‘a very good antidote to rotten USA worship’.By now, the industrious Briggs was making helpful friends. Long afterwards, one of them wrote that ‘he was then more obviously a Yorkshireman – thin, intense and jovial – you ...”

“... a sluggish professional launch in his twenties (the 1790s) as an unimpressive and underemployed barrister. His keen literary interests – folk and literary ballads, the new German medievalism – were still a sideline. But after 1800 he plunged for a decade into an orgy of bookmaking that was also literary revivalism, a grandiose project of ‘a complete ...”

“... with iron bars to break the knees of lily-white dancers; in one, the prima had a terrible secret: she was “half-caste”, a word I trembled to write down, as I knew from experience how completely it enraged my mother.’ The humour and the danger in these sentences doesn’t come from the narrator: it is smuggled in via quotation marks, from the ...”

“... regent, the prince was desperate to prevent the Post revealing any more about his awkward secret. He threatened the conductor of the paper, John Benjafield, with prosecution; Benjafield responded by threatening more disclosures. The prince offered to buy Benjafield’s shares in the newspaper; Benjafield named an absurdly inflated price; the prince ...”

“... with his subject is balanced by what is often an astringent critique – O’Connell’s work as a barrister and the imprint of this on his politics is a case in point, as are his Catholicism, personal and political, and his relationship (not least in financial terms) with his family. MacDonagh’s title, The Hereditary Bondsman, comes from O’Connell’s ...”