“... too much money. Patrick’s defence and successive appeals were paid for by his brother-in-law John T. Milliken, who had married Patrick’s beautiful sister May. Milliken had telegraphed Patrick’s counsel at the beginning of the case: ‘One million dollars, if necessary, for Patrick’s legitimate defence.’ As the case wore on and the defence case ...”

“... that he had believed his client to be totally innocent all along. As my friend and former landlord John O’Sullivan used to be fond of saying (and him a Catholic and all, and editor of the National Review) if the Pope says he believes in God, he’s only doing his job. If he says he doesn’t believe in God, he may be onto something. And Cochran brings me to ...”

“... around US military facilities have convinced him that they already have their own flying saucers. John E. Mack is, however, the jewel in the abductees’ crown. He is a Harvard professor who says that ‘you can’t say this phenomenon shatters our notions of physical reality and then treat it entirely literally in terms of our physical reality.’ Quite. At ...”

“... national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed to be the most vilified vested interest in the country. But from mid-century, unimagined national prosperity, assisted by Peelite finance, changed ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... But whenever someone new walked in, which they did quite often, they would pull themselves up like John Wayne at the sight of my cue, saying: ‘I’ll show you how it’s done, sweetheart!’ Fatal last words. The trick is to appeal to their protective nature. Respot the colours wrongly, snooker yourself, even miss the ball altogether: they get all misty-eyed ...”

“... in particular the mongoloid type or Down’s syndrome, first identified at Earlswood by Dr John Langdon Down. There was, however, more to this transformation than the mere growth of administrative protocol. Long-term shifts were occurring in the philosophy of what constituted idiotism, as is outlined here in a superb essay by C.J. Goodey. Theologians ...”

“... of bicycle from bad road surfaces, though there were strong men who rode them from Land’s End to John o’ Groats without suffering too many ‘headers’. As everyone knows, the golden age of cycling arrived in the 1890s, with the invention of the inflatable tyre. This was a golden age, too, for the admen, who readily saw that the way to symbolise pneumatic ...”

“... press, in an early and faint-hearted version of mutinies against discretion still to come, asked John Bullishly why a foreign-born consort should assume precedence over a daughter of King George VI. But this was as nothing to the squalor and piety which marked the Year of Grace 1955. In August, Margaret turned 25 and tried to pick up the threads with ...”

“... hosts are suitably variegated: Lord Glenconner (Colin Tennant) in St Lucia; the historian Sir John Plumb (‘peppery but very entertaining’) also in St Lucia; Norman Parkinson, the photographer, in Trinidad. He visits Richard Branson’s house in the Virgin Islands, pronouncing it to be more tasteful than others he could (and does) mention. He finds ...”

“... is the Palladian Chapel which Fanny Burney described as ‘a Pantheon in miniature’. Designed by John Tasker for Thomas Weld and made by Italian craftsmen in 1792, this is widely known as the first free-standing Catholic church to be built in England after the Reformation. Meanwhile Saint Andrews, the old village church from which Weld bones were removed to ...”

“... Indian teams had to be captained by whites. The most notorious example was the reappointment of John Goddard to lead the tour of England in 1957 over the obviously superior claims of Frank Worrell. This particular anomaly led directly to defeat, and had its share in the disaster at Edgbaston in the first test, when Ramadhin was required to bowl 98 ...”

“... recognition, not rhetoric, is of the line of Gorgias, while Vickers is one of the sons of sound John Locke. Anagnorisis, ‘recognition’ (usually of people believed lost or dead), is the poor relation in the family of Aristotelian literary terms. Hamartia, mimesis, catharsis are august words of power, but ‘recognition’ is almost an embarrassment to ...”

“... was published in 1977 in the volume Essays in Labour History 1918-1939 edited by Asa Briggs and John Savile. During the Twenties, the scale of unemployment benefit increased dramatically: compared with November 1920, the amount drawn by a man with a dependent wife and two children had risen 240 per cent in real terms by May 1931. But the abandonment of ...”

“... make women? At 19 she was close to suicide, but found strength to go on from reading Emerson and John Stuart Mill. These are her own landmarks, ‘disconnected but indelibly printed in the mind’. At 20, she began to write The Story of an African Farm. If she had been the child of an English Evangelical parsonage, she would have been conforming, in her ...”