“... handbook to history comes as a timely corrective. The shipwrecks listed include the one in which Lord Elgin temporarily lost his marbles and that in which the frigate Lutine gave up her bell to Lloyd’s. In four hundred pages many frantic images recur: women, with babies, lashed to the mainmast; crewmen racing aloft in the hope that, when the ship ...”

“... for Scotland. The Sopranos is a lot more fun. Once again we are in ‘the Port’, Morvern’s home patch: a harbour town on the west coast of Scotland, easily recognisable as Oban. It’s here that we’re introduced to the sopranos of the fifth-year choir of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour’s School for Girls: the naturally aristocratic Fionnula (the ...”

“... if it departs from what is lawful. But where it was assumed, in a classic checklist put forward by Lord Roskill in a 1984 case, that such functions as ‘the making of treaties, the defence of the realm, the prerogative of mercy, the grant of honours, the dissolution of Parliament and the appointment of ministers’ were by their nature inapt for judicial ...”

“... warrant by which the original arrests and searches had been made. Eventually, Chief Justice Lord Mansfield ruled that the arrest of persons by means of such warrants was illegal. And before that, Lord Chief Justice Pratt ruled that general warrants used to search unspecified premises were ‘totally subversive of the ...”

“... in what Robert Boothby described as ‘a highly inflamed state of mind’, the government’s Home Intelligence unit noted a growing wave of ‘anti-Chamberlainism’, but no one could have failed to note the furious public outrage against the Men of Munich, the Guilty Men. Chamberlain’s mistake in his last few months – he died in November 1940 ...”

“... ever since the persecution of Wilde in 1895, reaching some kind of peak with the trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in 1953. Morley thinks the homophobes had resolved to clean the national slate in Coronation Year, touted as the beginning of a new and purer era, and he indignantly but somewhat extravagantly compares their machinations with Senator ...”

“... live without eating? (Probably the latter, since he first tried out his theory on his horses.) Was Lord Seymour an ‘original’ or just a loutish practical joker because he fed his dinner guests laxatives and gave them exploding cigars? As Gill explains in her chapter ‘The Rise of Eccentricity’, early French views of excentricité showed a fearful ...”

“... stock and East India stock were all offering a better return than land – traditionally the home for new money, but now prohibitively expensive. The East India dividend was 10.5 per cent. The stock traded at 140-150, so the yield was a very attractive 7 or 7.5 per cent. The East India Company was an ailing mammoth. The old dream of a vast imperial ...”

“... part-time police officer and was shot and injured during the Troubles. She lives near the stately home of the late Lord Brookeborough, who, after the Northern Irish state was established, urged Protestant employers not to hire Catholics because their loyalty could not be relied on. He himself, he boasted, had ‘not one ...”

“... are punishments for making one’s career abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His poetry used regularly to be left out of Australian anthologies, but that is an old bad habit we may have grown out of by now. Mr James’s name attracts far more affection than odium, and he gets ...”

“... have recourse to the landscape, and it will never leave you, though you may leave it. Leaving home and returning are the main narratives. Rivers and roads, the long-distance elements of the landscape, are the geographical refrains of the genre. Williams’s lost highway is a metaphysical condition more than a place, a sort of Dantean circuit for damned ...”

“... Indians and with one another. Of the ‘List of Inhabitants residing in Calcutta’ drawn up for Lord Clive in 1766, only 129 of the 231 European males were British. The rest came from Portugal, the German states, Switzerland, Sweden, French Chandernagore and Ireland. Life in this frontier world, as Jasanoff says, was ‘never a two-sided saga of colonisers ...”

“... by later Fascist historians. Hardly had he taken his place at a new school than Mussolini was sent home for ten days for again stabbing a fellow pupil. At the age of 18 he stabbed a girlfriend. Physical violence, Mack Smith comments, ‘was instinctively his method of getting what he wanted’. Going to Switzerland at the age of 18, possibly in order to avoid ...”

“... of an earlier era and from the Gradgrinds of the new industries. On one side of them were Lord Melbourne’s successors, with their liking for a Garter which had ‘no damned merit’ about it: on the other Mr Scrooge. They had no inhibitions about proclaiming their altruism and the way in which they had acquired their sterling characters by steady ...”

“... minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. The credits tell us that the screenplay is by Pasolini, and so it is. But not in the same way ...”