“... carried to centre stage (not in Greek dress) a struggling bald man of about seventy years. Good Lord, it’s Henry James, cursing his tardiness. But they’re singing: ‘O sweetly spoken Word of Zeus ...’ Quite a lot better than the rain of boos he received last time. He looks ...”

“... association with defamation; it connoted simply a written publication). The act of 1857, known as Lord Campbell’s Act, didn’t create a new crime but introduced machinery, operable by local magistrates, for forfeiting and destroying indecent material stocked or distributed ‘for purposes of gain’. It was this statutory procedure, seemingly free of the ...”

“... been taught?’ As always, the Bible was there to keep her on message (‘Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?’), and within a few years she had learned to shuttle with ease between her two worlds, cheerfully picketing her high school graduation ceremony before heading inside to accept her diploma. But her fundamental decency obstinately persisted ...”

“... On the last day​ of the Article 50 hearing before the Supreme Court, Lord Kerr, one of 11 justices hearing the appeal, looked pointedly at James Eadie QC, who was responding on behalf of the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Kerr accused Eadie of ‘building quite an edifice on the phrase “from time to time” ...”

“... for telling me’ is very much better as Carroll wrote it, without the ‘very’. A poet called Lord Alfred Tennyson, not to be confused with Alfred Lord Douglas, briefly surfaces like the Kraken; the poem is here a Mort and there a Morte. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Henry James is ...”

“... of the excised sections of evidence aren’t very well blacked out). And here is a question put by James Dingemans QC (Lord Hutton’s chief – and, currently, chiefly benign – inquisitor) to Alastair Campbell: ‘Mr Powell told us yesterday that you had told him that Mr Baldwin had told you that the person who told him ...”

“... the shackles struck from him as his ermine-clad deliverer pronounces judgment from on high – Lord Mansfield proclaimed: ‘The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe. Let the black go free.’ The truth, as usual, is less dramatic but more instructive. English law, which recognised and enforced slavery until well after the Norman Conquest, no ...”

“... no status as citizens, could not be held to have violated their allegiance by rebellion.In 1781 Lord George Gordon stood trial in London for treason, having provoked anti-Catholic riots in the course of which the townhouse of the presiding judge, Lord Mansfield, had been burned down (a personal interest that appears not ...”

“... Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess Townshend’s Raynham Estate. The Townshend family still owns the airfield; the solar farm, one of a string ...”

“... When Charles II died in 1685 without legitimate offspring, the throne passed to his brother James, Duke of York, who had been brought up in exile in France as a Catholic and who now began publicly attending mass. Within a few months the Duke of Monmouth’s abortive rebellion and Baron Jeffreys’s judicial revenge, the Bloody Assizes, spread fear that ...”

“... made in this way, sometimes to good effect. Among the last, now more than half a century ago, were James Reid QC, a Scottish Tory MP who, as Lord Reid, became one of the best judges of the postwar years, and Cyril Radcliffe QC, a distinguished public servant and barrister. The legislation which in 2009 took final appeal in ...”

“... with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’. This was the primary reason King James II was forced out and replaced by reliably Protestant co-rulers, William and Mary. This Revolution brought in its train several other constitutional changes. Within two decades the succession had been diverted through the Act of Settlement (1701) to the ...”

“... when I plucked not, Sir, said she, Tell me, I pray, Whose hands are those? But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me. Then Money came, and chinking still, What tune is this, poor man? said he: I heard in Music you had skill. But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me. Then came brave Glory puffing by In silks that whistled, who but ...”

“... James Atlas’s The Great Pretender is a first novel. But Atlas has some prior fame as the author of a powerful biography of Delmore Schwartz, America’s poète maudit who died tragically unfulfilled in 1966, having lived out the truth of one of his best essays: ‘The Isolation of the Modern Poet’. The Great Pretender tells the story of a tyro versifier, who comes to artistic consciousness around 1966 in Chicago and who hilariously fails to attain any subsequent artistic fulfilment ...”

“... the temperature and stir the pot. Crouch alone would not have stirred the 1922 Committee, but Lord Hinchingbrooke, among others, could and did. It was the hands behind the knife that wielded the power, not the man who planted it in Dugdale’s back. Typically, Crouch was left friendless after his speech in the debate. Was Dugdale right to resign? I was ...”