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“... A.V. Dicey had three principles; John Rawls had four. Waldron pokes fun at this approach – ‘Robert Summers holds the record, I think, with eighteen rule-of-law principles’ – but that doesn’t stop him drawing up a list of his own. As well as access to independent courts, he says, the rule of law requires ‘people in positions of state authority to ...”

“... wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward ...”

“... to face covert attacks from right-wingers: it was alleged (and still is) that the British Secret Service was conspiring to remove this prime minister. The most blatant ‘Fascist’ move in the Britain of 1968 came when Cecil Harmsworth King, a hereditary owner of newspapers, invited Earl Mountbatten to seize the governance of Britain. Had the Earl been ...”

“... chosen by the Tories, in a field they think could be won (railways, British Leyland, the civil service or steel).’ Was it mere coincidence that these were four of the main sites of major industrial disputes during Thatcher’s first administration? For Ridley, the mining industry required the most detailed attention. A future Tory government, it was ...”

“... husbands and wives than between patrons and clients. When these homosocial bonds of gift and service come into conflict with the claims of marriage – as they do in the final movement of The Merchant of Venice, where Portia contrives to supplant Antonio as Bassanio’s principal benefactor – Shakespeare isn’t necessarily sympathetic to the ...”

“... it, in the cough of snarling weekend traffic. Through all the miles of hamlets dominated by US service personnel, the tidy estates of Euro functionaries, and the secure parks of exiled kleptocrats, I never questioned whether this journey was necessary. Adolfo was propelled by the memory of an obligation, in his early legal days, to drive out here to a ...”

“... at the time, was determined to endow scholarships that would attract bright pupils to the colonial service. Suret won one in 1938, his prize a trip to French West Africa. The following year he won a trip to Indochina. He couldn’t fail to notice the difference between the two. In West Africa he’d been told by the French, ‘the Africans are good chaps as ...”

“... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on ...”

“... and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next door.18 March. Geoffrey Palmer’s memorial service from St Paul’s Covent Garden, one of a growing number, I imagine, of those held on Zoom. I am unexpectedly on the verge of tears for someone who always put a smile on my face in art and life. I once told him that I was hoping to write a play, the first ...”

“... and sciences’, created a corporate sponsor for knowledge-gathering. One of its founding members, Robert Boyle, a Hudson’s Bay Company shareholder as well as an Irish plantation owner and an EIC director, wrote questionnaires to guide the RSL’s factors, who eagerly supplied the society and other metropolitan institutions with travelogues, dictionaries of ...”

“... the coast, Flavin was the first to spot the incoming storm. She sent her report to the Irish Met Service in Dublin, who shared it with the Allies in London. The next day, the meteorologist James Martin Stagg’s team of forecasters identified a break in the storm on 6 June, a narrow window of opportunity over the Channel that would allow the landings to ...”

“... The welfare state became the warfare state – an outcome Roosevelt neither foresaw nor desired. Robert Dallek is troubled by the absence of leadership in contemporary American politics, and his biography of FDR is meant to show us what the real thing looks like. ‘In this time of demoralisation,’ he writes, ‘it seems well to remind Americans that the ...”

“... yielded the poorest literature. With the exception of two lucid studies of its foundation, Robert Hildebrand’s Dumbarton Oaks (1990) and Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation (2003), each the work of a serious diplomatic historian, little or nothing of analytic interest exists about the organisation, which has proved an intellectual sink-hole, down ...”

“... college letter came the best Christmas of my life. Before university, though, there was National Service to be got through, regarded at best as a bore but for me, as a late developer, a long dreaded ordeal; it was touch and go which I got to first – puberty or the call-up. I served briefly in the infantry, then like many university entrants at that time ...”

“... has gone out of British Airways and that as the stewards have got older and less outrageous so the service has declined. This morning there is scarcely a smile, not to mention a joke, the whole flight smooth, crowded and utterly anonymous. The British Council reading is packed, with two hours of radio and TV interviews beforehand. All the interviewers are ...”