“... from an anti-white ‘genocide’ (even as it continues to fund a genocidal war); or when Stephen Miller, noting the presence of ‘all the foreign flags’ at a demonstration in LA against deportations, calls the city ‘occupied territory’. But neither the Trump administration nor the far right has a monopoly on the abuse of the word ...”

“... au Magistrat’, though without saying where or when. I am grateful to the sharp eyes of Andrew Wilson, who spotted the Mountjoy reference by chance (or by alphabetical serendipity: he was researching a family ancestor called Merryweather) and kindly shared it with me. The story, such as it can be reconstructed, is contained in two sets of court ...”

“... wheat is a very efficient system if you ignore the consequences, the baker Andrew Whitley argued in Cereal, an excellent six-part audio series about wheat, broadcast last year through the Farmerama podcast. He covered many questions more or less ignored by Zabinski’s book, such as the taste of wheat and how it is milled. The theme of ...”

“... legal practice. Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to present jury history as a whole is Thomas Andrew Green’s Verdict according to Conscience. The book is subtitled ‘Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200-1800’. It sets out briskly and well in difficult Medieval terrain, begins to falter in the 17th century, and collapses in a heap ...”

“... freedom, as far away as possible from the white man’s freedom to dominate others, as espoused by Andrew Jackson, George Wallace and Trump. These radical traditions have always been embattled, but they have not vanished, and they have been enriched and reinvented by successive waves of immigration.Athird generation​ American, born in 1972, I am an heir to ...”

“... the president was under investigation. The letter the president drafted with his aide Stephen Miller to convey the news to Comey began: Dear Director Comey … While I greatly appreciate your informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation concerning the fabricated and politically motivated allegations of a Trump-Russia ...”

“... Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the ...”

“... and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of midnight ...”

“... platforms complaining about having been ‘cancelled’. In 2020, the conservative broadcaster Andrew Neil tweeted that the left-wing journalist Owen Jones had ‘tried – and failed – to cancel my BBC career many times’. He was referring to Jones’s persistent criticisms of the far-right content that appears in the Spectator, of which Neil is the ...”

“... and moved to a cottage in Hampshire, in a village called Steep, where he lived for two years. Andrew Sinclair, in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993), includes a few sentences on his stay. Daniel Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an ...”

“... the CIA in Thailand, his stories were nevertheless leaked to journalists, most prominently Judith Miller of the New York Times, which published them on the front page. I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Well, you never know what’s going to happen. I presented the President a list of about fifteen things that could go terribly, terribly wrong before the war ...”

“... you will understand the trrragedy’ – to a student who claimed not to see the point of Max.‘Andrew, with your Kant worrrrk’, ‘Sara, your labours with Krrristeva’, ‘Tony, with your worrrk on Fichte’: four or five of us took every class Rose would give us, and obviously, I called us the Rosettes. Ridiculous, I used to think, addressing our ...”