“... notion of a luxury is limited, and they tend to say that they would like a bottle of champagne (Lord Dacre insisted on a crate) or of perfume, or they would prefer to have writing materials or a radio powered by the sun. Only a few avoid these obvious choices. If memory serves, Sir Thomas Beecham wanted a revolver, Arthur Scargill chose the Mona Lisa, a ...”

“... spell each day as they circled the exercise yard.De Profundis, a 55,000-word letter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, written by Wilde during the final months of his two-year sentence, is a strange literary creation, a hybrid text. It was the only work he produced while in jail. On 4 April 1897 the prison governor informed the Prison Commission that each ...”

“... again because his paperwork didn’t measure up – while also losing his job and his home. He was left on the street. As it turns out, the one source of evidence that might have put a stop to this torture – the landing cards that recorded arrivals from the Caribbean until the 1960s – was destroyed by the ...”

“... and others against the Spectator. (The magazine had reported him drunk in Venice: the late Lord Goddard had a bias against the press; and years later I remember Crossman, again in the ghastly Bung Hole, cheerfully admitting that he had been as drunk as – what? Not a lord, perhaps. A skunk?) These sorts of shifting ...”

“... what is it worth?’ Bibliophiles are like that, always asking what it’s worth, in cash terms. Lord Emsworth didn’t worry what his pig was worth. Gussie Fink-Nottle and Ken Livingstone love their newts for themselves, not for their market value. P.G. Wodehouse: A Centenary Celebration, 1881-1981 is also lumbered with a bibliography, which takes up half ...”

“... time Victoria sought more money – as when she married Albert, or when one of her children left home – it was to Parliament that she applied for increased funds. The second development, which was an unforeseen consequence of the creation of the Civil List, was the gradual accumulation of a personal royal fortune, where none had hitherto existed. The ...”

“... On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington.15 March 1994. A reply ...”

“... in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in India took place under British rule in Bengal in 1943, exacerbated by Churchill’s insistence that the grain must go to the troops and not to the people who grew it. Tharoor quotes Amartya Sen’s ...”

“... to the novelists by the fancy name their father had affected in order to suggest a connection with Lord Nelson. ‘How can you ask me to lecture on the O’Pruntys?’ he shouted. But he did as he was asked. He and Heilman were, or became, great friends. The secretary of the department had an affluent businessman husband, and they had taken Henry under their ...”

“... Then he said: ‘I am a respectable married man and if that gentleman comes out again I shall go home.’ I expostulated with Tom, who restrained his curiosity for the rest of the evening: I reminded Tom of this episode shortly before he died; He remembered the waiter perfectly and said: ‘Why did he say he was a respectable married man? I wonder what that ...”

“... no less enamoured, was Harriet Wimsey (née Vane), as she visited Denver Ducis for the first time. Lord Peter assures her that the drive is indeed a mile long, that there are deer in the park, and that peacock do strut upon the terrace. As he observed, ‘all the story-book things are there.’ Similar scenes, evocative rather than detailed, abound in Buchan ...”

“... By 1934 and It happened one night, the first of the comedies in question, directors were wholly at home with it. There is also the social fact of a generation of female stars, all born between 1904 and 1911, all figuratively speaking the daughters of the first tough and public feminists and all thus ready, by their thirties, to throw themselves with puzzled ...”

“... source material. Sadly, though, the best known modern voice in this controversy has been that of Lord Dacre, who has argued zealously over the decades that Macpherson was a mere forger. Dacre seems blind to the larger interest that the Ossianic corpus might have. But then fate has had its revenge on Lord Dacre. This new ...”

“... by Philip Michael Thomas, and about to become Crockett’s partner. He’s after the same drug lord as Crockett is, so that in the previous encounter to set up a supposed deal, three out of the four players were undercover agents. Generally in this series there are so many agents making actual drug commissions to establish their criminal credentials that ...”

“... the ‘Learned Elders’ chew the cud Of liquidation’s fruits, they weave their spell. That is Lord Alfred Douglas on Judaism, further demonstrating what is apparent from other evidence, that he was a prize plonker. It is just one fragment among a torrent of primary-source material relentlessly amassed by Anthony Julius in his history of English ...”