“... It would not be too much to say,’ wrote the otherwise unsympathetic Max (now Lord) Beloff after Harold Laski’s death in 1950, ‘that ... the future historian may talk of the period between 1920 and 1950 as the “The Age of Laski.”’ Thirty-seven years later a leading historian of the Labour Party observed that ‘Laski’s time and reputation have gone into almost total eclipse ...”

“... support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian; and he was delighted to play Burke to Harold Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor ...”

“... time. Cyrus Spitama was present when Zoroaster was murdered and heard the voice of the Wise Lord speaking through his grandfather’s dying person. This gives him a position of almost prophetic superiority, but happily his sense of vocation is weaker than his political ambition (‘the way of the golden eagle of the Achaemenid’), and easily succumbs ...”

“... the left and – my word! – there’s Bradbury in the middle, totally unmarked, to nod the ball home. It would be unfair to suggest that there’s any devious kind of opportunism in this, which I am sure is not his nature, nor even that it’s in some way unhealthy, since he seems a writer pre-eminently concerned with our cultural ‘health’. It’s just ...”

“... his parents took pains to make ‘by no means indifferent to him’. His father was Henry Fox, Lord Holland, who made a lifelong career of court service and management in Parliament and a huge and dubious fortune as paymaster during the Seven Years War, and yet nursed and passed on to his son a grievance against George III for refusing him the additional ...”

“... 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 ...”