“... remain in the ordinary legal system. In the two influential reports that heralded these changes, Lord Briggs suggested that the online court process might have three stages. First, you, the claimant, would fill in a form online. Pre-populated boxes would help you to clarify the nature of the claim. You would select your opponent: your builder, say, or your ...”

“... the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and with such evident trust, that he does not even realise it rhymes.I picked up Simon Critchley’s On ...”

“... no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a perception of the activities ...”

“... to name it. He merely says demurely that he persuaded Olivier’s friend, their shared publisher Lord Weidenfeld, that – how does he put it? – ‘between them [Olivier’s] two books did not add up to a comprehensive, let alone objective, account of one of the most extraordinary lives, in any profession, of this century.’ Holden has a nice line in dry ...”

“... doing, to other people, to people we knew. Then, in the 1997 general election, after I had left home and gone to university in England, Martin McGuinness became our MP. He never could have been my father, of course. Even the words I use betray my upbringing: Derry or Londonderry? Full disclosure might be proper, though it is unusual in writing about ...”

“... with the National Trust’s guides). It’s the sort of book that would look much more at home in a BMW or Mercedes than a Mini. This production breathes an odour of ‘England’s Heritage’: one can imagine it in a bookcase beside works with titles such as ‘Roman Highways of Old Britain’ or ‘Our Cathedral Towns’. That’s a pity, for ...”

“... providing, for instance, a definitive list of the pet names used by the family. Nancy was Koko at home, Pauline or Paul to her husband, Susan to her sister Jessica, who was also Susan to her in return. Jessica was always Decca, except when Susan. Deborah was usually Debo, though frequently also Nine (a reference to her supposed mental age) or Tiny Swine ...”

“... taken away all at once, cheaper foreign goods of the same kind might be poured so fast into the home market as to deprive all at once many thousands of our people of their ordinary employment and means of subsistence.The political reality is surely that the outcome of the tortuous trade wrangles to come will be decided ultimately by voters’ fears rather ...”

“... and pliant imperial officials, he ensured they were invested in his success. Worried that Home Rule for Ireland might unravel the British Empire, he paid Charles Stewart Parnell’s Home Rulers ten thousand pounds in cash to guarantee they would support the principle of Irish – and by extension settler-colonial ...”

“... no more than a big room above the Co-op store, near the roundabout on Admiralty Road. On the way home from the pictures – the Rosyth Palace, maybe having seen there a naval epic such as The Cruel Sea or Above Us the Waves – I sometimes stood at the bus stop opposite and listened to the drums, trumpet and saxophone, and through the windows saw the shadows ...”

“... public intellectual is critical of government penal policy (which is more than likely), would the Home Office be a friendly user? Probably not. She might try to contribute to ‘culture’ but the document, not surprisingly, gives no examples of what this might involve. In any case, all of this is camouflage. What Hefce (or its political master) really wants ...”

“... the Crusades is to consider all dimensions of women’s participation, both on campaign and on the home front. She casts a very broad net. Like other recent historians, Nicholson redefines crusading to denote ‘any military expedition originated, authorised and organised by the papacy [or] any expedition which its participants depicted as a crusade … or any ...”

“... ironically opens with the self-slaughter of one of the Revolution’s most implacable foes, Lord Castlereagh. And irony holds the key to 19th-century attitudes towards self-destruction. From pulpits down to penny-dreadfuls, Victorian moralists, absolute for improvement, respectability and duty, could not condone the coward’s escape. Hence, as Gates ...”

“... steeds like the generals from battle pictures, sometimes in recognisable stretches of their home territory, but often in front of Classical landscapes that look like the stage-sets for what is, evidently, an aristocratic performance. The notion of equestrian sports as the sports of kings became harder to sustain in the reigns of the first two ...”

“... ashes, to get the solder that had melted into small lumps. We put these into a bag and took them home. When we had enough Aunt Alice would melt them in an iron pot. Then she would wet a small piece of level ground, make impressions in the damp soil to the size of a stick of solder, and pour the melted solder into them. When the solder cooled she used to wash ...”