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“... within lay religion may sometimes look like special pleading. An old man of Cartmel, told in James I’s reign of Jesus Christ and His saving power, remarked: ‘I think I heard of that man ... once in a play at Kendal called Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree and blood ran down.’ For most historians the story reveals an abyss of ...”

“... sense, but the response to a crisis which is either close to death or mimics it. Death itself, Lord Yama, repeatedly fails to keep dates, even when Jasmine has arranged her wedding to him, in the form of sati. Jasmine’s several incarnations are more than a device. They exemplify the main power a passive character has: to become someone other and stop the ...”

“... desires which can’t be satisfied. A thinly disguised version of the Birmingham Six case exposes Lord Denning’s judgments on the matter (better to imprison the innocent than bring the law into disrepute) as a classic example of Utilitarian callousness. From this anodyne utopia, Caritat beats a retreat to Communitaria, a country which works in Gadamerian ...”

“... have done more to restrain Dawson from his excesses; as it was, John Walter IV, co-proprietor with Lord Astor, complained when ‘our leader-writer’ proposed dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. His qualms were ‘airily’ brushed aside by Dawson. Half a century on, what of Rupert Murdoch? ‘Arguably,’ says Heren, ‘he owns too many newspapers to run any of ...”

“... and alarmed if his gout did not return regularly. Besides, gout was very much a mark of status. Lord Chesterfield said it was ‘the distemper of a gentleman, whereas the rheumatism is the distemper of a hackney coachman’. It attacked not only the wealthy but the creative, which meant that no man of letters could afford to be without it. Some thought it ...”

“... blue pencil – although, considering that John DeLorean had at times retained the formidable Lord Goodman to defend his reputation, it is remarkable what the lawyers have let through. A jigsaw – and this is a jigsaw – is never going to be a work of art, but this is an exciting read, full of sex, drugs, high life, financial juggling, purloined ...”

“... Keynes (‘trying to turn himself into a heterosexual with a ballet dancer’) leers at Toomey, James Agate (‘a well-known sodomite’) makes a pass at the dreadful Heinz ... One is reminded, in a coarser way, of the closing stages of Proust’s novel, where one by one wellnigh the whole cast show themselves inverts.* After watching a porn movie in which ...”

“... the Commons or the country. There was something contrived about his political style: Robert Rhodes James has observed that his speeches ‘exuded insincerity’. Bracken was occasionally roused to defend the free-enterprise system by attacking ‘doles’ to the unemployed or minimum wages for miners, but even that roused little Tory sympathy. He still seemed ...”

“... English. There are impressive instances which seem to affirm this – notably in the 18th-century James Thomson, author of The Seasons, whom Robert Crawford treats with proper and welcome respect. Does any one seriously maintain that Thomson, a great poet, would have been greater if he had written in ‘the Doric’? In the present century, however, I number ...”

“... of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery. The status of an enslaved man, James Somerset, who had escaped in London and been kidnapped for re-enslavement became a national debate. The decision in 1772 by the lord chief justice that Somerset must be freed terrified the colonists. Edward Long, a ...”

“... sanctuary spaces ceased to be available. Still, the tradition of legal sanctuary clung on until James I finally ended it in 1623. A decade later, John Ford used sanctuary as a plot device in his play The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634). Warbeck was a pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes in the Tower murdered by ...”

“... needy ones ’at clusters all about Er the Gobble-uns’ll git you, ef you don’t watch out! James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote the above embarrassing and disgusting verse, was, of course, voicing what was, in the 19th century, considered a very proper and creditable sentiment. (The poem came out in his Rhymes of Childhood in 1890.) It contains, as well, an ...”

“... and bettering themselves. The titles of the memoirs reflect these successes: From Workhouse to Lord Mayor; Climbing the Ladder; Pitman and Privy Councillor; Onward and Upward; Success Hammered out of the Rock; and simplest of all, How I Got On. Only 12 of the autobiographers in Griffin’s sample of 350 who were born in rural areas remained agricultural ...”

“... it wasn’t altogether surprising that another gate opened, courtesy of Maurice Bowra and Lord David Cecil, to a fellowship at Oxford. The only begetter of the study of literary theory at Oxford, he became the subject’s best-known teacher there, the leading authority in the field in Britain, and one of its most acclaimed proponents in the world ...”

“... when they were by. My arms and my legs were unusual encumbrances . . . and my bottom! . . . Lord help it! When I walked out of the room, it felt three times as big as it ever did before, and I thought it shaked most uncommonly! Weeton’s sense of physical and social dislocation was common among those working at close quarters with another family. Anna ...”