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“... he didn’t commit. This time there was an unlikely political hero in the form of the elderly Lord Chuter Ede. As home secretary in the Attlee government he had approved the execution, and thus, as Evans says, had less to gain than anyone alive from reopening the case, but he was driven by conscience to help do so. By now Evans had hoved into the view of ...”

“... the first campaign had had ‘next to no impact’. Grammar, as well as decency, caused arguments. Lord Hailsham wrote to Margaret Thatcher: ‘I am convinced there must be some limit to vulgarity! Could they not use the literate “sexual intercourse”? If that is thought to be too narrow, then why not “sexual relations” or “physical ...”

“... political climate. The early 1980s, like today, were a bad time to ask the government for money. Lord Hailsham had described the social sciences as ‘a happy hunting ground for the bogus and the meretricious’. It was, as Pearson says, a belief widely held in Tory circles: the social sciences, they felt, lacked rigour as a discipline, producing ...”

“... George Cony​ , a London merchant, had once been a friend of Oliver Cromwell. But when the Lord Protector slapped a tax on silk imports without the consent of Parliament, Mr Cony protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him ...”

“... too, to further indiscretion. We need to know more about how this ‘elective dictatorship’, as Lord Hailsham called it, actually works. A flood of revelations could only be to the public good. But knowledge, for these purposes or its own, is not, in the Conservatives’ lexicon, a good. This no doubt is why Thatcher remains unaware that no historian ...”

“... in the House of Commons in all matters. It is to restore, in all its brutal simplicity, what Lord Hailsham in a 1976 lecture called Britain’s ‘elective dictatorship’. (The phrase had first been used of Garibaldi.) Hailsham himself had used the phrase before, in 1968 and 1969: so always when Labour was in ...”

“... the Mansion House was not struck by a thunderbolt on the night in 1936 when the Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, told the guests at the Lord Mayor’s Dinner: ‘His Majesty’s Judges are satisfied with the almost universal admiration in which they are held.’ Or, for that matter, on the same occasion in 1953 when the ...”

“... policy of avoiding politics and controversy, inviting on right-wing figures like Enoch Powell and Lord Hailsham and co-opting left-wing outliers like Tony Benn, Eric Hobsbawm, Arthur Scargill, John Pilger and Stuart Hall. She set about coaxing – and sometimes wrestling – as much emotion and revelation from her castaways as she could, using the ...”

“... and one had to catch up with a celebrity that everyone else had already divined: Fiennes, Bingham (Lord Lucan’s son), Vestey, Wellesley, Sainsbury. There were copious numbers of double-barrelled names: Fearnley-Whittingstall, Austen-Leigh, Scrase-Dickins, the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward ...”

“... in the index. The assassination of Aldo Moro is referred to five times; the assassinations of Lord Moyne and of Count Bernadotte are not mentioned at all. The root cause of Arab violence is thus suppressed, and we are then given to understand Arab violence has no cause at all. It is mere violence for its own sake. At the time, as Mr Townshend says, the ...”

“... could be made against Wilson were that he had a liking for seedy businessmen, some of whom, like Lord Kagan, he eventually ennobled, and that he had visited the USSR 19 times. Leaving aside the extreme difficulty of believing, on the basis of Wilson’s years in government, that he was a Communist, we have to remember that Wilson also befriended and ...”

“... Lib Dem); ‘I run an equestrian/activity centre and am an international show-jumping judge’ (Lord Rowallan, Conservative); ‘My inspiration comes from the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury who dedicated his life to children and the underprivileged’ (the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, crossbencher). Some names crop up on the ballot again and again: Baron Biddulph has ...”

“... even Gerald Ronson will have found. Any hopes of an honour or title will have crumbled.’ Even Lord Lane could be forgiven for thinking it pretty rich to be called a dinosaur by the judge who jailed Michelle Renshaw for being too scared to give evidence and who sent Tracey Scott to prison for six months with her baby for letting her friends take goods ...”

“... Express. His book contains a certain amount of the old acid. Towards the end, he has a crack at Lord Carrington for allegedly being a snob. It is one of his many stories, told at second or third hand, that sometimes strain credulity. Carrington lived in the same London square as one Patrick Maitland, to whom, according to Junor, he never deigned to ...”

“... order, inflation – because each is the tip of the iceberg of all the others, as Hall reported Lord Hailsham saying at the time. This is so because all these panics have a common panic hidden inside them: ‘the direct interpellation of the race issue’.Policing the Crisis isn’t just one of the best books written about Britain in the 1970s. It is ...”