“... 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 ...”

“... gold coins, was also a compulsive gambler, and needed to pass the fever on. He is recalled coming home from a disastrous night at his club, bursting into the bathroom, and challenging his son to flip for half a dollar, then double or nothing, then raising the ante, then double or nothing, and so on till Budd was a fortune out of pocket. ‘When I looked up at ...”

“... good grace to a lank-haired whizz, And from the Crucible, their battlefield, Nobody needs to go home on a shield. But now on Friday, 21st of May We hear what happens in a proper fight. Eight thousand miles south in San Carlos Bay The invasion has been going on all night. Men on both sides have really died today. The bridgehead’s been wide open since ...”

“... Boer War he distinguished himself in some of the hardest fighting, and eventually became ADC to Lord Roberts. Meanwhile, his grandfather had died and he inherited the dukedom. He came home to marry his childhood sweetheart Shelagh Cornwallis-West, and to take on ducal duties and pleasures at Grosvenor House, ‘the finest ...”

“... as yet learned to maintain standing armies. Ready to hire themselves out to any prince, city or lord prepared to pay for their services, such companies could make their paymasters militarily very formidable. Their martial skills were matched by their skills in pillaging, looting and burning, and in bullying towns and often whole regions into paying ...”

“... would never happen. He’d died without that consolation. But for the others, the retirement home villains, dog love justifies everything. Reg and Ron never recovered from premature exposure to Lassie Come Home. It blighted their emotional development. It helped to formulate the lodge rules for survival in the dance ...”

“... inauguration of the Romanes Lectures in 1892 pales by comparison with the subsequent service of Lord Jenkins as Chancellor of Oxford University. Above all, there is a chasm between Gladstone’s all-encompassing Christian theodicy and Jenkins’s secular, sceptical, post-Freudian outlook. Yet many of their common experiences and career parallels amount to ...”

“... is quite sure) people prevented from leaving the Kingdom. All sorts of things can be done, both at home and abroad, in times of emergency. Even if the Prerogative isn’t mentioned anywhere, it can still apply. When plastic bullets and CS gas were distributed to the police in the 1980s, the courts upheld the action as within the Prerogative, one judge noting ...”

“... was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out of his element there, but he took it all in: Judy Garland and Sinatra singing ‘impromptu’ with a hired piano player. All the stars. ‘Before the night was over,’ he writes, ‘people jumped in the pool in ...”

“... and Israel than God’s bald declaration of holy ground and the violating human shoe. Still, the Lord kept his part of the bargain not only by leading them out of Egypt, but by looking after their feet: ‘And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot.’ Even Lobbs of ...”

“... the English Sprachraum it was perhaps never all that high in the first place – because of ‘The Lord Chandos Letter’, the tiny but freakishly important story of 1902, the wonderful-but-never-seen play, Der Schwierige, a swansong of passivity in the drawing-room; and, above all, the opera libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der ...”

“... from his old self to his present self. Referring to the death of his mother, ‘I, once a lord of language,’ he says, ‘have no words to express my anguish and my shame.’ Straightway he proceeds to revel in the survival of that lordship. ‘What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.’ Yet pen wrote it and ...”

“... and the Court of Appeal will always get it right in the end. This is not a view which is taken by Lord Denning. British justice, he said after the quashing of the Guildford Four verdict, was ‘in ruins’. It is important, however, to pinpoint the cause of his concern. It is not the action of the Police leading to the wrongful convictions of the Guildford ...”

“... Unfortunately, there is so much printout that we can’t see Liz and Steve: it could be Lord Lucan and Madonna having it off behind that mountain of electronic excreta. Nowhere in these illustrations do we see a book, or a human being reading a book. The Codex would seem to be BL 2000’s dirty little secret. Presumably there will be a grimy ...”

“... an interview with a 21-year-old woman who had had 789 lovers. ‘Prince Philip, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Hailsham and Brigid Brophy were all quoted on what they thought about the subject.’ The only sex-related subject not permitted in the paper was homosexuality. Murdoch was against it: ‘Do you really think the readers are interested in poofters?’ The ...”