“... at Kew, and when he was stopped, lay on the ground and refused to budge, having to be carried home on his servants’ shoulders. A few days later, Dr Francis Willis unveiled his new purpose-built restraining chair, which George immediately dubbed my ‘Coronation Chair’. He might have been deprived of his wits, but he never lost his wit. He noted that ...”

“... into sarcastic black comedy. In English the dialogue, near the end of I.ii, runs thus: Horatio My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral. Hamlet I prithee do not mock me, fellow-student; I think it was to see my mother’s wedding. Horatio Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. Hamlet Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The ...”

“... high spirits, if less sensible in giving in to them. In due course she was brought from the family home in County Durham to be launched in London. From Seaham Hall, a solid neoclassical house which she always loved, with its views across the terraced gardens to the sea, Annabella was catapulted into Regency London, and a milieu of high taste and low ...”

“... and sublime, his real heartland was – at least on the showing of this exhibition – the Home Counties: Windsor, Virginia Water, Luton Hoo, the country round Basingstoke and round Maidstone, where he produced extensive, undulating panoramas and occluded views of ancient woodland. At Luton, he became fascinated by the beech trees, some of them with ...”

“... of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left British public debate since then. It was ...”

“... for an education authority to sack married women teachers on the ground that their duties lay at home or, in 1948, that it was perfectly all right for Wednesbury Corporation to use its cinema licensing powers to stop young people going to the pictures on Sundays? Not one of these decisions, each of them affecting what we would recognise now as fundamental ...”

“... from friends, charged to his mother’s account, and lived reluctantly though luxuriously at home while he earned two bits an hour cleaning engine parts in a local aviation firm. ‘He’d then take his lunch from a fitted wicker picnic basket that held sandwiches with their crusts removed by the Norwegian cook, a linen napkin, and a fruit knife.’ He ...”

“... high-tech civilisation – but it grew New Wavier as the series developed. The Pastel City, about Lord tegeus-Cromis’s struggle to save his homeland from brain-stealing monsters, is written in a clear and direct style reminiscent of Robert Howard (the inventor of Conan the Barbarian): ‘Tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate of Viriconium, the ...”

“... the state rooms of Norddeutscher Lloyd liners. Yet, as Despina Stratigakos observes in Hitler at Home, Hitler considered him ‘the greatest architect to grace German soil since Karl Friedrich Schinkel’. Most members of the German architectural trade had, during the Weimar Republic, turned to international modernism or Expressionism. Hitler was hardly ...”

“... unfolding storyline, costs millions of dollars per episode to make, and seems largely intended for home-recording or DVD viewers, who will trouble to watch it in sequence. It is on billboards and the sides of buses everywhere and the puff interviews are inescapable (its network, AMC, has never had a hit show to publicise before). The first series ran on BBC4 ...”

“... Marxist Group members led to the party’s implosion soon afterwards. Sillars found a new home in the SNP, and by the late 1980s his idea of ‘independence in Europe’ had become the keystone of the party’s strategy for a reassuringly non-separatist form of independence. (By a further irony, Sillars has in the past decade reverted to a Lexit ...”

“... and Geoffrey Stephenson under the title Suspicion and Silence.* But since my disagreement with the Lord Chief Justice is on record in Hansard, I leave it there for now. The second topic, which connects to the first through the notion of fairness in how evidence is obtained, is the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’. There is no disagreement that a conviction ...”

“... it helped show that to Shakespeare, ‘as to other Elizabethans, England was something more than a home and a country: it was an inspiration. At no period in our history has the realisation of national unity been keener, the consciousness of national identity more intense.’Countless historical novels, costume dramas and schoolbooks of the early 20th century ...”

“... to answer. Part of his extraordinary success can be put down to luck: he was good-looking, and a lord, and he wrote in English, a language which was already, for non-literary reasons, on the way up. But Byron also had the right gifts, a quick, strong intellect and a forceful turn of phrase. He had an unprecedented flair for getting his sexual presence into ...”

“... while the capacity of modern statesmen to live up to them has undergone an exponential rise since Lord Macaulay so crisply profiled Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in ...”