“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... favourite word hung in the aftermath. ‘Obviously’. The obvious and the hidden. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts. ‘Am I hidden, and my parents obvious?’ I thought. Yet what was obvious to me seemed opaque to them – my lack of religious faith, my ‘philosophising’, my attention to the pain and suffering of things . . . And here I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... well known. Dylan is among the (male) English (language) poets here: the translators of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Stevens, Frost – all figure prominently. Much of what Ricks has to say on this ...”

“... the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred or so of these ...”

“... borrowing ‘patriot’ language to further the claims of a group of potential ministers, led by Lord Rockingham, who were being kept out of office by the King’s refusal to accept them. These claims were kept up by Rockingham and Burke as long as the former lived, by Charles James Fox and Burke thereafter, and by Fox ...”

“... that ‘there is some connection between Burns’s “Vision” and the vision of Boethius.’ James Kinsley’s encyclopedic Oxford edition of the poems and songs has traced this connection, in its assessment of sources for the work. The supernatural devices of Pope’s Rape of the Lock are employed; the division of the poem into sections called Duans ...”