“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... suggest that nobility dwelled among the nobility, that handsome did as handsome was. Mytens went home and became a picture dealer. Van Dyck, like many great portrait painters, came to tire of the job – or at least to look for more demanding work. A trip to France shortly before he died was made in the unsuccessful pursuit of a commission to decorate the ...”

“... he doesn’t want to say that the crew might have left a living man behind. The crew flying home don’t know what is happening on Earth because no one is telling them and it will take them ten months to get back. Then a camera shows some sort of action on Mars, solar panels being moved, bits of broken tents being put together. This must be Damon at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... figure at the centre of That They May Face the Rising Sun, however, is Joe Ruttledge, who has come home from London to live in this isolated place. He is both insider and outsider, watching and noticing just as a novelist does. His house resembles the one McGahern lived in, and some of the novel’s characters are lightly fictionalised versions of neighbours ...”

“... wealth meant that respectable careers in banking and commerce gradually became available at home, while the rapid expansion of the East India Company’s army and administration provided options overseas (a posting to India, though not without risk, was an attractive option for young men who didn’t have the connections to establish themselves in more ...”