“... Court’s jurisdiction. Irritated, the SNP set up a further review group under the chairmanship of Lord McCluskey. Alas, that group endorsed the views of the first panel. In the interim Alex Salmond, then the first minister, and his secretary for justice, Kenny MacAskill, had engaged in highly personal attacks on the UK Supreme Court and its members, prompting ...”

“... being pursued through the courts by rich and powerful claimants. I described my fear of losing my home after an MP sued me (personally) for defamation. The civil servants took notes and asked sharp questions. The most senior of them made it clear that he was ‘hearing from all sides’, but seemed particularly attentive to the way English courts were being ...”

“... Beaufort was the dynast who was the real creator of Tudor royal power, and she had rebuilt her home at Collyweston, in Northamptonshire, in regal fashion as a triumphant expression of all that she had achieved in promoting the interests of her son Henry in his improbable progress to the throne of England. By 1503 Lady Margaret was styling herself when ...”

“... its members have become terrorists? Mr Justice Chamberlain had asked the lawyers representing the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, this question. They replied that they were ‘not there to give legal advice’.The only definite limit to the meaning of ‘support’ is stated in Section 10 of the Terrorism Act, which gives protesters immunity from prosecution ...”

“... morosely about the food and wine, and fretful that he was not able to spend more time at home.Vaughan’s life revolved around the two cities of London and Antwerp. He was born around 1500 into a London mercantile family of Welsh descent and was probably educated at St Paul’s School; he seems to have known its founder, John Colet. His father was an ...”

“... he died believing in God and in the authority of the Pope and the Catholic Church. He had not, as Lord Chancellor, imprisoned and interrogated Lutherans and sent six reformers to be burned at the stake, just so that he might die for slender modern scruple. The drained, contemporary view of More, which admires not what he believed but how he believed – his ...”

“... drama, The Massacre at Paris. Religion loomed large in Canterbury. The only book in the family home – at least by the time of John Marlowe’s death in 1605 – was the Bible. In St George’s parish, lying between the cathedral and the city’s eastern gate, Marlowe grew up literally in the shadow of the Church. He witnessed its finest pomps, also no ...”

“... Priest: With sorrow for misusing and abusing the beauty and resources of the earth, we pray to the Lord. All: Lord have mercy. From the Litany of Contrition at a Catholic church in Sussex, December 1996 To build a roadway or a pavement or a house or a skyscraper you have to scrape away topsoil. This stuff is alive. Just ...”

“... born-again Christian from the charismatic Episcopal Church of the Apostles who believed that the Lord had healed his wounds and who – in the words of one former associate at the National Security Council – ‘thought he was doing God’s work at the NSC.’ There was Oliver North the Man of Action, able to work 25 hours in every 24, dubbed ...”

“... an Englishman, the normal pattern would be to spend some years, after an elementary education at home, in the great schools there, then to return home to find employment and, as soon as possible, a benefice, then to go back for a further period of study at Paris or perhaps Bologna, after which he would be fit for the ...”

“... therefore, she subsequently improved it. On his way to the wedding, George told his friend Lord Moira that he would ‘never love any woman but Fitzherbert’. Caroline had thus to contend with a wife, or former wife, and a reigning mistress. She never had a chance of winning. George was drunk at the wedding ceremony, and drunk and probably impotent ...”

“... minutes’ – which means that Bozzy picked up a prostitute in the few yards which separated his home on the Lawn-market from the law courts in Parliament House. He began to drink again, sometimes throwing things about the house when he returned; he tried to control himself (never more than six glasses of wine at a time, he promised his friend Temple), but ...”

“... of drama in the story of how the news of her father’s death came to her in Kenya and she came home as Queen. She entered upon her new duties as one would have expected. ‘I’ll be all right. I’m strong as a horse,’ she said in reply to those who worried that she might be asked to do too much at the Coronation, and: ‘Did my father do it? Then I ...”

“... of war: in fact, the nearest I have come to war was in 1940, when I and other members of the Home Guard patrolled round Oxford gas works. We foresaw with a flash of strategical penetration that the entire German parachute force would land on Oxford, if only because Oxford was supposed to be in those days a seat of learning. Why it should concentrate on ...”

“... 1921 because of the social differentiation between Ulster and the Southern Unionists (who, under Lord Midleton, made their reluctant peace with the Republic). The tragedy for many Ulster Unionists was that, even by the mid-19th century, England was already outgrowing the political economy on which Pitt’s Union had been based. Ireland received the same ...”