“... that there is an apostolic link – however indirect – with Macaulay, Jeffrey, Lockhart, Lewes, Hutton, Stephen. When he reviews the academic can, with a little historical imagination, conceive himself as useful to civilisation in a way that he isn’t when merely adding unasked-for information to the store of human knowledge with his learned ...”

“... of Jimmy James and his two stooges, the beautifully and bizarrely named Bretton Woods and Hutton Conyers. Some of their more absurd moments show the influence of the interwar Liverpudlian monologist Billy Bennett and the surreal braggadocio of Eddie Braben’s particular favourite, Dave Morris, the man who claimed to have successfully defended Crippen ...”

“... talents aren’t urgently needed. Alan Johnson becomes home secretary. Bob Ainsworth replaces John Hutton at defence and Peter Hain returns as Welsh secretary. Not forgetting Alan Sugar, who has been appointed ‘enterprise tsar’ in place of the unlamented Digby Jones. Another classic piece of gimmickry which will inevitably backfire. Whatever next? Susan ...”

“... has sanctioned the killing of thousands in Iraq. He votes against the war but celebrates when Lord Hutton sandblasts the government’s slate clean. He is a diligent constituency MP but dislikes his constituents, at least en masse. They seem not to have registered that things have got better, as the song foretold. After the 2005 election victory, he sits ...”

“... justice. Only this November, Mr Justice Dingemans, renowned as the remorseless counsel to the Hutton Inquiry, broke down in tears as he sentenced the stepbrother of Becky Watts for her murder. Eight members of the jury were in tears too. In this case, the crime was so peculiarly horrible that nobody thought the worse of any of them. In the Victorian age ...”

“... to Iraq’) and the devastating Scott Inquiry which that trial provoked. He followed the Hutton Inquiry into the government scientist David Kelly’s suicide and the ‘sexed-up’ intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War. He dissected the grotesquely delayed Chilcot Report, which described ...”

“... earliest prominent figure, the glamorous and elusive Baron Gottfried von Cramm, married Barbara Hutton and had an ambiguous relationship with the Nazis; his tenacity and panache had a lasting influence on the game, apparent not only in Boris Becker and Michael Stich (who resembles von Cramm in the sheer fluency of his strokes) but also in the remarkable ...”

“... opportunist’. Howard’s hope that Iraq could be used against Blair was quashed when the Hutton Report proved to be a whitewash: ‘Blair had escaped condemnation,’ Snowdon writes, ‘while the episode rebounded on the Tories.’ The Conservatives’ failure was more significant than was apparent at the time, for it revealed the difficulties they ...”

“... he writes about the heartaches of Joan Crawford, Jane Fonda and Bette Davis; imagines Barbara Hutton taken in a white silk crib to the White House followed by five hundred devotees; pictures Marlene Dietrich moving ‘majestically down the avenue to guard over/the war-torn refugees, waifs who lined the house’. Barbara Stanwyck is ‘a watchful, ever ...”

“... of Section 29 of the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 with the Convention. ‘If a court,’ Lord Hutton said, ‘declares that an Act is incompatible with the Convention, there is no question of the court being in conflict with Parliament or of seeking to override the will of Parliament. The court is doing what Parliament has instructed it to do in Section 4 ...”

“... admiring, however reluctantly, of his unscrupulous cunning. But it emerged pretty clearly from the Hutton and Butler Reports that he had persuaded himself of both the practicality and the virtuousness of what he had made up his mind to do and had then arranged to be sheltered from any information that might have given him pause. (Alastair Campbell to John ...”

“... of drainage to those of water retention. These U-turns extend to our institutions. The James Hutton Institute is the UK scientific body behind the monitoring and measurement on which the Peatland Code depends, yet it was its predecessor, the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research, that boasted in 1968 that we could convert a million acres of ‘bog into ...”

“... million years to reach its present, habitable temperature. At the Oyster Club in Edinburgh, James Hutton captivated the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment with his own account of how the ‘unconformities’ of granite and schist at Jedburgh and Siccar Point could have been produced only by the gradual, indefinite mutations of the Earth itself. In ...”

“... into his roles, as if to concede that life is too damn difficult. Grant was married to Barbara Hutton for a few years. She was maybe the richest woman in the world, but not the most interesting, and if he despaired of what he was doing at her luxurious social events, then kissing Ingrid Bergman for a few minutes at a time in Notorious may have been ...”

“... younger figures, several of whom, such as Douglas Jay, a future Labour minister, and Graham Hutton, who had been a student of Harold Laski’s at the LSE, embraced progressive ideas and agitated for the paper to take a sympathetic view of alternatives to the insular conservatism of the Baldwin years.The Economist’s enhanced, if also more ...”