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“... One law for the Lion & Ox,’ wrote Blake, ‘is oppression.’ He was describing in his oblique way what Anatole France a century later described more brutally as ‘the majestic even-handedness of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.’ France’s English contemporary Lord Justice Mathew made the point in more genteel terms: ‘In England,’ he said, ‘justice is open to all, like the Ritz ...”

“... the family house in Dorset. Her great-grandfather, Isaac Butts, had been the patron of William Blake, and her father gave her daily lessons in observation in the Blake Room, which housed 34 of his water-colours, engravings, portraits and sketches. In 1905, however, her father died and nine months later the contents of ...”

“... Waterstone’s conducted a poll to find the ‘Book of the Century’ in 1997, the winner was The Lord of the Rings (The Hobbit was 19th, just ahead of L’Etranger, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was 21st, just pipping The Trial). When the BBC’s The Big Read invited viewers to vote for their favourite novel in 2003, The ...”

“... to ‘God’s system’. It resembled the submission granted to a mistress by a lover. Like Blake, he was able to imagine the institution in sexual terms. Unlike Blake, he approved of it. And unlike Johnson – for all that Johnson, with his companionate black servant, was ‘a friend to subordination’, who held ...”

“... how ‘the bookseller’s manager, no doubt looking for a design of Beardsley’s, pitched on Blake’s Anteus Setting Virgil and Dante upon the Verge of Cocytus as grounds for refusal, and when Arthur Symons pointed out that Blake was considered “a very spiritual artist”, replied: “Oh, Mr Symons, you must ...”

“... pleadings and opinions for signature when the typist was away. My head of chambers could recall Lord Darling, memorably insulted by the Birmingham Daily Argus in 1900, when he lectured the local press on how to report his decisions, as an impudent little man in horsehair who might have made a successful bus conductor, sitting in the 1930s on the judicial ...”

“... of Burke, the turncoat from the opposition, now in the monkish garb of a Spanish inquisitor or lord chancellor, severe and upright as he sets down names on a ‘Black List’ which contains captions such as ‘The Man of the People has lived too long for us!’ Clayton uncovers the motive with admirable lucidity: ‘Freedom of speech was a professional ...”

“... secretary of the committee which planned it was the British MI6 officer and Russian spy, George Blake, who passed details of the entire operation to the Russians two years before the tunnel was completed. Here, too, is the story of MI6’s courageous decision to order Commander Lionel Crabb to swim under a Russian warship in Portsmouth to take photographs ...”

“... that ‘Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was voted No 1 (above Winnie the Pooh, Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland) in a Sunday Times survey to find the best ten children’s books.’ Even if the word ‘best’ is translated into reasonable terms (‘currently most popular’?), the claim remains impressive, and implies classic ...”

“... inspired by Chinese incursions into Australian goldfields. In South Africa, after the Boer War, Lord Milner imported fifty thousand indentured Chinese to work the Rand gold mines; the subsequent row over their mistreatment (and misbehaviour) convulsed British Liberals and gave Winston Churchill the opportunity to protest that ‘slavery’ was a ...”

“... King Duncan, of the Beast. Two English writers went to Cuba. One went after Fidel Castro became lord and master of the island or rather archipelago. The other went before and after that unholy second coming. Edna O’Brien, poor girl, visited Cuba the way Alice travelled to the other side of the looking-glass – darkly but gladly. England can be so boring ...”

“... for certain privileged social groups – in effect, the licence of the lawless aristocrat. From Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde, the aristocrat and the anarchist have always been secret bedfellows. If the English love a character, they also love a lord, which is one reason Byron (who was literally an aristocrat) and Wilde (who ...”

“... still speaks directly to anyone who feels they are in the power of Mr Worldly-Wiseman, ‘my Lord Turn-about, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech . . . Mr Smooth-man, Mr Facing-bothways, Mr Any-thing; and the parson of our parish, Mr Two-tongues’. These visionary caricatures ...”

“... the ‘infamous brute’ whom it was Wilde’s worst bit of luck to cross, also had it in for Lord Rosebery, who at the time of the Wilde libel action was Prime Minister. Queensberry had followed Rosebery to Homburg, stalking him with a dogwhip (presumably, says Pearson, because he didn’t happen to have a horse with him), and grievous bodily harm was ...”

“... to move them one way or the other. In that sense, ‘a tear is an intellectual thing,’ as Blake puts it in ‘The Grey Monk’. For the same reason, the history of weeping is a slippery enterprise. At the end of his immensely readable and often puckish exploration, Thomas Dixon sighs, with reason, that ‘it is impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon ...”