“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the Huguenots themselves. At the centre of the archive is Marie de la Rochefoucauld, feudal lord in her own right of Champagné, who wrote a memoir of her strenuous lives in four different countries (lastly in Ireland). This exciting work, which for all its evidential value is also a manifest piece of self-fashioning, finally made it into print in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan said: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 10. An experienced cabinet minister said in an interview: ‘I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’ Here are some 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... original if somewhat amateurish begetter of methodical inquiry into the membership of Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”