“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lost at sea in pursuit of a design to return 144,000 Jews to the Holy Land. Tany recorded: ‘The Lord came upon me in power . . . and fell upon me in my shop.’ He was struck dumb, blind and insensible ‘in the beholding of hundreds of men’. There is a danger of patronising, even mocking, these mid-17th-century religious prodigies. Even Alexander ...”

“... she wanted to play the game in 1849 on a visit to Mansfield to meet the family of her new fiancé, James Collinson. By now, at the age of nineteen, her poems had been accepted in the national press, and after the despair that her father’s illness had cast on the whole household, she was enjoying again the audacious conversation and artistic ambition of the ...”

“... the ‘wrong’ name or pronoun during the baptism, an inventive and compassionate formulation.)Lord Mackay of Clashfern, Thatcher’s lord chancellor, was an elder in the even stricter Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which considered it sinful to attend Roman Catholic mass. In the mid-1980s, Mackay attended funeral ...”

“... care to mention one – even one – attainment of the Wilson period that could bear comparison?Lord Melbourne’s over-used but pungent observation about the Order of the Garter, that he liked it because there was ‘no damned merit in it’, is very necessary for any consideration or reconsideration of the Wilson phenomenon. If he represented anything at ...”

“... prompted the argument that episcopacy was divinely appointed. It seemed questionable again late in James I’s reign, when the Arminians asked themselves what allegiance they would owe if his son Charles were to smile upon the Calvinists. The Seven Bishops’ defiance of 1688 had a long history of latent clericalist aspiration behind it – an aspiration whose ...”

“... for herself what the book referred to was like. Improbably, she was entranced by The Letters of Lord Chesterfield to His Son, and this, in turn, ‘launched her into a lifetime course of reading, beginning with Chaucer in Middle English, moving on to Erasmus, Donne, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and even Finnegans Wake’. In this case, the ...”

“... how. From 1942, according to the Tusas, the British Government and bureaucracy had concluded (the Lord Chancellor, Simon, scrupling half-heartedly) that the major war criminals should not be tried, but put to death by executive action. Much was made of the precedent of the relegation of Napoleon to St Helena by a decision of the Congress of Vienna. The Tusas ...”

“... arose from the reforming ideals that Buxton shared with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the ...”

“... her mouth, or break from her. The blackmail story, which Fullerton related pathetically to Henry James as well as to Edith Wharton, his new mistress (or one of them), might, one thinks, have been all an interesting fiction to put a polite face on Fullerton’s lack of interest in committing himself elsewhere. Sherlock Holmes, following Arsène Lupin, would ...”

“... Here and there McWilliam does catch a glimpse of the Claimant as a more timeless figure: a modern lord of misrule, the ultimate inappropriate person. His childlike greed, his knee-jerk lusts, his refusal to be cast down, make him irresistible in a ghastly sort of way, and it is hard not to sympathise with him through all the ordeals he brought on himself. The ...”

“... empire. Hugo Young recalls the ‘patronising astonishment’ with which her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, witnessed this effusive display. Asked by a colleague, on his return, how the visit had really gone, Carrington replied: ‘Oh, very well indeed. She liked the Reagan people very much. They’re so vulgar.’ The story illustrates the major ...”

“... of Northumberland. Andrew’s mother, Lady Catherine, born in 1781 in Dresden, was the daughter of Lord Claverton, who had retired to Redmond Manor (now the property of an Arab magnate), some seventy miles from Marbot Hall, after a lifetime spent in the diplomatic service in Germany, the Low Countries and Italy. The main influence on the boy came from the ...”