“... the fees. Similarly severe is Sisson’s essay on a fellow civil servant, eight years his senior, Lord Redcliffe-Maud: ‘a fine specimen, without a doubt, of the secondary public man of his epoch – of the race of heads of (the right) colleges, Permanent Secretaries, chairmen of Royal Commissions and the like, who live just below the surface of public ...”

“... common law and subject to its constraints. It was so when Elizabeth I’s autocratic successor, James I and VI, wanted to rule by proclamation; it was so in 2010 when Theresa May wanted to use the royal prerogative to bypass Parliament; it was still so in 2017 when it was proposed that the UK leave the EU by ministerial fiat rather than parliamentary ...”

“... few defensible places remaining in loyal hands, the ostensibly loyal hands of the veteran soldier, Lord Darcy, a scenario reminiscent of Ivanhoe. (Had the Middle Ages ended?) According to his own muster book, Darcy could raise only 260 fighting men to confront the many thousand Pilgrims now occupying York. Without help from further afield Darcy had little ...”

“... her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp.’ And it’s as good as Lord Byron. Take the life of Disraeli, for ‘novelist’ read ‘poet’, and you’ve got an epic about what happened to Byron after he’d recovered from that deadly fever at Missolonghi. Having fought for Greek independence, he falls out of love with the ...”

“... scratch that, you’ll never get away, you didn’t fight for your freedom when you had it.’ Oh lord, what a terrible vision. Out and then in. Each dying then recovering. While they were both still in hospital, Chloe and I would meet waiting for the elevator between their separate floors, have a quick grim consultation with each other about the two days of ...”

“... with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. Her name was Abishag. She was of the tribe of Issachar, from the ...”

“... Chinese curse: they live in interesting times and discover that they have an interesting history. James Belich’s volume – the first of a projected two – is the most remarkable product so far of the historiographical re-assessment with which New Zealanders have been challenging their sense of themselves. It should remove them from the wings, and place ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk’. Anglophone readers who can locate ‘that’ part of Siberia without a good atlas deserve spot prizes. The historical date and exotic location gave Meek a fictional and cultural space in which extraordinary events and people could seem believable, when placed inside a landscape rendered in exact and first-hand detail ...”

“... me free …” that sort of thing. But where was God now, with Heaven full of astronauts and the Lord overthrown?’ It’s a question that many have grappled with, including Joni Mitchell, lightly paraphrased here. The lines are from ‘The Same Situation’ on her 1974 album Court and Spark: Still I sent up my prayer Wondering where it had to go With ...”

“... patterned, but each sentence is a discrete explosion. There is, for example, the disagreeable Lord von Winternigg in Roth’s greatest novel, The Radetzky March (1932), who rides through the garrison town in his barouche: ‘small, ancient and pitiful, a little yellow oldster with a tiny wizened face in a huge yellow blanket ... he drove through the ...”

“... written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of ...”

“... plot is Ananke. In Paid the praxis is shockingly interrupted by a knockabout Father Christmas, a Lord of textual Misrule who addresses the audience directly, thanks them for coming, asks them to tell their friends to bring their kiddies, and beseeches them in pantomime fashion to keep his appearance a secret, so as not to spoil the fun for future ...”

“... by the index. There’s Bette Davis and Joe Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s Basil Dean and James Dean, Jack Warner of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore. Kim Novak and Ivor Novello are neighbours, but then so are ...”

“... Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to ...”