“... is the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated? But both he and his nemesis, John Bellingham, are more interesting than this implies, and the fatal act that brought them together, Andro Linklater thinks, is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David ...”

“... and was met by a near unanimous lack of critical acclaim. The screenplay was based on a novel by John Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India before and during the Second World War. Masters’s family had had a relationship with India stretching back five generations; I have been told by elderly Indian army officers who served with him ...”

“... bequest, he could have exploited the resources of the exhibition for far longer than he did. By John Snell’s bequest of 1677, 12 exhibitions were endowed for students from Scotland to study at Balliol for periods of private study lasting up to 11 years, with the requirement that exhibitions be given to Scots who would take holy orders in the Church of ...”

“... in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate ...”

“... work on behalf of the dispossessed. In London, Jones mixed with lawyers politicised by the radical John Wilkes; in Wales – no longer Yūnus Ūksfurdī but hanner Cymro, or ‘half-Welshman’ – he defended the rack-rented poor against the entrenched power of an anglicised squirearchy. His letters from the assizes towns of west Wales deplore ‘the abject ...”

“... root out immorality and ungodliness. As Puritan after Puritan remarked, there was no shortage of laws against wickedness, only of a readiness to implement them. The Major-Generals were intended to work with, not to replace, the local machineries of justice, which in some cases were galvanised, if only briefly, into action – to the pleasure of the ...”

“... an obligation, to question not only practices abroad, such as genital mutilation and religious laws permitting marital rape, but also certain habits at home, ‘emotions and desires that are inauthentic in the sense of being inimical to self-development, self-expression and rational autonomy’. There is nothing sacrosanct about any culture or religion’s ...”

“... the street: ‘There goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor anyone else understands.’ John Locke, then a political refugee in the Netherlands, simply couldn’t master the mathematics, though this didn’t stop him reviewing the book in the Dutch press. He was glad to be reassured by a local expert that he could take the sums and proofs on ...”

“... instruction book, known as the ‘Bible’, 750 pages long, weighing four pounds. In 1999, John Reckert, a senior executive of Burger King, explained at a conference the relationship between technology and employees. ‘We can develop equipment that only works one way,’ he said. ‘There are many different ways today that employees can abuse our ...”

“... speak for the Australian electorate? The impasse proved too much for the governor-general, Sir John Kerr. Although his authority was constitutionally questionable, Kerr broke the stalemate by ousting Whitlam, dissolving both houses of parliament, and calling a new election. The shock waves from this (ab)use of the royal prerogative continue to reverberate ...”

“... of Cape Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style ...”

“... against Anacharsis Cloots, turned on their consorting with foreign bankers – the Englishman John Ker, the Dutch banker Jean Conrad de Kock, the Belgian Charles Proli, the Moravian Frey brothers, the Spaniard André-Marie Guzman – and speculating in global markets. The sans-culottes distrusted any political behaviour whose workings were not local and ...”

“... law. But the same caveat applies: such incorporation would mean that these transferred rights and laws could be altered in the future by a sovereign parliament. As Bogdanor remarks, some thoughtful politicians, such as Dominic Grieve, are proposing a new British Bill of Rights in the event of Brexit so as to protect vital rights against such legislative ...”

“... the party’s crisis years in the middle of the century. When Sir Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, the party split. The free-trading Peelites became an independent force for the next decade and eventually merged with the Liberals. They left behind a stolid party of the landed elite, out of touch with and determined to thwart the needs of urban ...”

“... Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday Club, pointed to the growing constituency for the National Front and insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no ...”