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“... as was done in 1531 when Henry VIII had poisoning made treasonable by statute in order to have the bishop of Rochester’s cook boiled to death for poisoning the Lambeth Palace stew (a measure cited by Lord Hoffmann in the House of Lords’ debate on the Rwanda safety bill as an early example of unprincipled ad hoc legislation).Treason’s​ path, so far as ...”

“... arbitrary than the longer critical haul of a century or two. For instance, shares in Elizabeth Bishop (d. 1979) are at an all-time high, helped by the timely publication of her letters; while shares in Philip Larkin (d. 1985) are at an all-time low, helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way down, Robert ...”

“... the witness box. My own recollection is riveted to the moment when Mortimer was cross-examining a bishop and his clerk rushed into court with a note telling him that his wife, who had just had their first baby, was haemorrhaging. Mortimer stopped in mid-question, turned to me, said ‘Carry on’ and shot out of court. He returned an hour or more later to ...”

“... student union’s funds. Copies were presented by well-dressed representatives of the union to the Bishop of Strasbourg, the city’s chief of police and the rector of the university as they filed into the Palais Universitaire for the opening ceremony of the university term. A further round of chaos ensued in the form of a ‘revolutionary festival’, which ...”

“... in interiors being ‘very Buckinghamshire’ and her mother’s alleged failure to adhere to Alan Ross’s snobs’ charter on U and non-U. The Middletons have been further mocked for having commissioned a coat of arms. Certain patterns of behaviour recur. With a sure populist instinct Diana gave the people what she wanted to give them in controlled ...”

“... intercession with the Commandant – the author suggests that Colonel Capper relented to spare the Bishop’s shame, but one suspects he was beaten in a fair fight – and he departed chastened to his regiment. The Royal Warwickshire was in India: Sandhurst makes a point of not giving its products a ‘character’ and he was therefore able to settle in as a ...”

“... if they take on all exceptions to their rule. Inspired by their reading of social anthropology, Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas explained the increase in accusations of witchcraft in early modern England as a result of late 16th-century social and economic change. Steadily, though, incongruent cases gathered in drifts, even though there was only a modest ...”

“... of anti-Communism that the overseas patrons could wish for. Hence the careers of Desmond Tutu and Alan Boesak, the latest and best exponents of this crab-like upward leverage into power-broker status. The Western liberal dream was that black South Africans could somehow be gently led to liberation by living saints – Christian Gandhis – who would blessedly ...”

“... Devolution has so far provided more of a threat to Brown’s ambitions than the posturings of Alan Milburn and other surrogates of Blair. After all, nobody – not even Brown, who has the biggest stake in finding a plausible solution – is able to provide a compelling answer to the West Lothian Question. Why should Scottish MPs have a right to vote at ...”

“... and a few months later Lawson resigned. The ostensible reason was his inability to work with Alan Walters, Thatcher’s personal economic adviser, whom she had refused to sack when Lawson asked her. But really he had reached the limits of his capacity to endure what he saw as her growing intolerance of views she didn’t share. Thatcher had used the ...”

“... self-expression were followed by middle-class backlash strengthening the Conservative Party (Alan Bennett’s hilarious and savage film A Private Function reconstructs some of the circumstances which made Conservatism after 1945 ‘even more of a class phenomenon than it had been between the wars’.) Class polarisation in politics ‘peaked in ...”

“... Explorations (1962). Yeats coined it to praise the philosophy of George Berkeley, the 18th-century bishop of Cloyne (and so a cleric, as well as ‘clerkly’), which Yeats thought had seen off a threat to civilisation no less deadly than that posed to Greece by Xerxes and his men: the enemy for Berkeley, as for Yeats, was not military but intellectual, the ...”

“... Ville Radieuse relocated to the gardens of Victorian Edgbaston. Sheppard Fidler’s successor, Alan Maudsley, largely responsible for bleak and monolithic developments like Castle Vale and Chelmsley Wood, was jailed in a corruption scandal linking him with the contractors Bryants.Vinen isn’t very interested in style or architecture, which is very ...”

“... those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly employed on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the culverted Hackney ...”

“... cope. Karen was born in Beirut and came to the UK when she married a Lebanese man who lived in Bishop’s Stortford. The marriage broke up around 2008 and she took the boys back to Beirut, returning with them to London in 2014 and taking a private rental in Grenfell Tower. It wasn’t easy to pay the rent, given London prices. She could only work 16 hours ...”