“... pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to see the gore, and to purloin souvenirs. The Victorians were not dainty in ...”

“... a sliver of that loss from council tax, which the Tory government also decided to cap.*Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s capping of the domestic rates in 1984 (something I had a small but culpable hand in at the Number Ten Policy Unit) and the abolition of the Metropolitan Counties and the Greater London Council in 1986, Tory governments have shown a flinty ...”

“... angular character. Powell had decided that being a Tory politician meant that you had to learn to hunt, so he would rise at an ungodly hour from his lonely bachelor flat and travel to hounds by tube, dressed in full hunting pink, amid somewhat bemused workmen. Though he shared a love of poetry with Powell, Macleod was appalled at the idea of early rising, let ...”

“... of both sexes – accused their neighbours of conspiring with the Devil to afflict them. The witch-hunt spread out into the colony when the accusers were taken to other towns to identify witches. Nineteen people were hanged at Salem, and, because the judges decided to spare the lives of ‘confessours’, many more were imprisoned for life. The concept of the ...”

“... while the related verb paillarder is glossed as ‘to haunt bawdie howses’ and ‘to bitch-hunt it’. The other word used is ‘adultères’. Mountjoy was at this time unmarried (Marie Mountjoy had died in 1606, and his subsequent marriage to Isabel d’Est was not until 1615), so the primary sense of ‘adultery’ is not strictly ...”

“... of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary. Johnson liked teaching and had a taste for the rough and tumble. His great day was not as a young man who worried about apartheid, or a feisty libertarian outnumbered by big French Stalinists in bleus de travail, but as a ...”

“... use ballistic/prosthetic devices to hurl soggy yellow-green tennis balls for their hunt-and-retrieve pets. And the stoic Chinese couple, accomplishing their own version of the Long March, scorch rubber treadmarks around the padlocked novelty of the pristine football pitches. Artificial grass is better than the real thing, tougher, each blade ...”

“... announced post-referendum by Nigel Lawson from his home in France: to ‘finish the job that Margaret Thatcher started’.Daisy HildyardFarmers,​ who were divided by the Brexit vote, are reliant on the EU for regulation, migrant labour and handouts. Financial support payments are currently distributed using a system which has become notorious for its ...”

“... was entirely unknown; new protocols were introduced once the dangers became clear. According to Margaret Thatcher, ‘all patients received the best treatment available in light of the medical knowledge at the time.’ These claims were not true.In​ 1970, Richard Titmuss celebrated Britain’s tradition of voluntary blood donation in The Gift ...”

“... is ‘well meaning, but already a little pompous and a bore’. She and her even shorter sister, Margaret, were known as ‘Lilibet and Lilliput’. Before Elizabeth’s coronation, Channon wrote that ‘conversation has taken a Gilbert and Sullivan quality. Coaches and robes, tiaras and decorations. Winnie Portarlington announced at lunchtime that she has ...”

“... industry propelled him to the presidency of the SAG. From that platform, he enlisted in the witch hunt – naming names, wrecking careers, ruining lives. He claimed to have accused no individuals in public, but he certainly did so in private. For years, he minimised the importance of the blacklist or denied its existence, even as he assisted in implementing ...”

“... my ex-PV colleagues having to answer,’ he tweeted at the beginning of March. ‘Witch hunt doesn’t really do it justice … Some things that if true, I would be guilty of too. But then I’m not a Muslim, am I?’ The Sunday Times claimed last month that as many as a hundred teachers and teaching assistants in Birmingham ‘could be prevented ...”

“... of the president, José Eduardo dos Santos, who assumed office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There ...”

“... politics; on the links between Brazilian and African cultures via Oshosi, the Yoruba spirit of the hunt rendered in Portuguese as ‘Oxóssi’ and syncretised with St Sebastian, the patron saint of Rio de Janeiro; and on the utility of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s work The Denial of Death in understanding Zidane’s red card in 2006 as a ...”

“... the legal protections that exist for abortion in Britain. The Tory MPs Nadine Dorries, Jeremy Hunt and Maria Miller have all campaigned in the past to reduce the 24-week limit.UK opponents of abortion now have the wind in their sails. The course ahead is predictable. The Conservative MP Danny Kruger pointed the way when he warned against ...”