“... had persisted in acquittals against the clearest instructions from the judge. Indeed, in Rex v. William Hone (1818) the jurors had been intimidated by a rabble laughing aloud in court! The Lord Chief Justice, Ellenborough, had himself given the jury an exemplary charge: ‘in obedience to his conscience and his God, he pronounced this to be a most impious ...”

“... name for my own blueberry-loving toddler than the jubilant More Fruit. In 1603 the antiquary William Camden cited the new practice among the gentry of using surnames as first names, pointing to Grevill Varney, Bassingburne Gawdy and Calthorp Parker: ‘Although many dislike it, for the great inconvenience that will ...”

“... their families in ersatz châteaux and the legendary jazz scene – Truman may have heard Charlie Parker live – was a middle-class affair found in labour union halls rather than bordellos. Two Irish gangs, the Goats and the Rabbits, fought for control of the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his operations out of a two-storey ...”

“... clerk at Helpston in Northamptonshire. In the early 1760s, she had a relationship with John Donald Parker, an itinerant Scottish fiddler and teacher who was working in the village school. On discovering she was pregnant, he disappeared and was never heard of again. Her son was christened for the absent father, and became a talented traditional singer, a gift ...”

“... in the way Rilke or Jarry or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for ...”

“... despotism, requires unpacking. The stars aside, the first generation of Hollywood executives – William Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Marcus Loew, Louis B. Mayer and Adolph Zukor – were, by the 1920s, the most colourful symbols of America’s dynamic, expanding motion-picture industry; and from the 1920s till the present day, observers ...”

“... dried buttons of the mescaline-containing peyote cactus in Oklahoma from the Comanche chief Quanah Parker. The first experimental subject, a 27-year-old chemist, stretched out on the bed in his college room and experienced ‘a train of delightful visions such as no human being ever enjoyed under normal conditions … My pleasure so far passed the more ...”

“... experienced climate change but that they may, in part, have caused it. The palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman has suggested that people started assaulting the ozone layer with greenhouse gases about eight thousand years ago, when farming began to replace hunting and gathering. Deforestation carried out by a growing population may have made the world ...”

“... the first English printed book) was The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, published by William Caxton in 1477, which grouped a miscellany of moral sayings under authorial headings. Many of the ‘quotations’ gathered in this ramshackle way would have made their ‘authors’ wince: Homer is said to have written ‘A good man is bettir thanne alle ...”

“... of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ...”

“... Jones was staying with the Edes they heard a crash. Ede at once sensed that Jones had knocked over William Staite Murray’s tall vase, Heron, which Murray had said should never be in ‘an atmosphere of nervousness’. Ede himself dropped the Poisson d’Or, denting the nose. (Brancusi fixed it.) The Ede circles overlapped only here and there with ...”

“... whom Skinner cites on that subject go further than the work of the Parliamentary writer Henry Parker in 1642, which apparently equates slavery with subordination to the ‘will’ of a king who ‘may’ turn on his subjects? Or what of the Levellers, who seem to have thought of slavery not only as a present affliction but as subjection to the ...”

“... heretical books. Chief among the writers of these and among More’s English antagonists was William Tyndale, Luther’s chief English disciple – if it is fair to call anyone so combative and individual the disciple of anyone. In the preface to his translation of the Pentateuch, made in 1530, Tyndale tells us how he had determined to translate the New ...”

“... manipulating the media. As their marriage deteriorated, and as Charles took up again with Camilla Parker-Bowles, it is as easy to understand why the Princess encouraged her friends to talk to Andrew Morton as it is to understand that the Prince was horrified and humiliated when Diana: Her True Story appeared. For someone as lonely, insecure and unhappy as ...”

“... to the record sleeve, Bowie played most of the guitar on Diamond Dogs (1974) himself. But Alan Parker, whose contribution is acknowledged for only one song, ‘1984’, perhaps deserves more credit than that. Of the guitar part on ‘Rebel Rebel’, Parker told Trynka: ‘I can tell my own playing, and my own sound, and ...”