“... engulfs Jennifer. She lies awake until three o’clock in the morning in the empty marital home, ‘afraid; afraid of the future, afraid she was going mad, afraid of the wind rattling on the windows’. One’s first impression is that The Listeners is repellently written – or, to be fairer to the author, written in a deliberately trashy, novelettish ...”

“... into an oppressively conventional one.’ Biography is not, perhaps, a very suitable form of home industry. The inevitable reaction against a famous writer at his death combined with the reception of the Memoir to turn the greatest poet of the Victorian age into something of a period joke. Under the guise of rehabilitation Harold Nicolson’s biography ...”

“... of politicians were killed by overwork, Pitt and Canning among them. Overwork undermined Lord Castlereagh, Samuel Romilly and Samuel Whitbread II, who committed suicide, as did 16 other MPs in this period. Spencer Perceval, however, was shot by an unbalanced debtor, so becoming the first and thus far the only British premier to be assassinated. MPs ...”

“... milk run’ to the peak of Matterhorn, but that climb was my last: all the way up I visualised Lord Francis Douglas coming down the way that he did in 1865 – straight – and it spoiled the trip for me. Soon after I read a book entitled Alpine Tragedy. Its most telling point was made in a series of photographs of the great Alpine peaks: etched down their ...”

“... With war in Europe an immediate prospect in July 1914, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, felt a tinge of guilt at his growing excitement and ‘hideous fascination’ with the detailed preparation. He caught the mood of the moment. ‘No one can measure the consequences,’ he recorded; ‘we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance ...”

“... on his luck, but he had never known poverty and the only charity he required began and ended at home. During the period of rural tranquillity that followed his tumultuous years in London, Winstanley began hearing voices and having visions. The conclusion of the Civil Wars and the imminent execution of the king drove him into a chiliastic frenzy in which he ...”

“... 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 ...”