“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is Japanese: the particle wa, for example, is used as a topic marker (in ‘Me, I’m going home,’ ‘me’ is a ‘topic’), and concomitantly as a way of distinguishing between descriptive and evaluative statements. Problems of antecedence and co-reference are ingeniously, indeed wittily, solved in languages so obscure that Technological Man might ...”

“... by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope was subsequently chosen as the architect ...”

“... table and big game hunting. One such house was the staggering, swaggering baroque of Bryanston for Lord Portman; another was the castellated, constipated confection of Skibo for Andrew Carnegie; and a third was the ebullient, flamboyant Renaissance of Sennowe Park for Thomas Cook’s grandson. These houses were for social advancement, self-indulgence and ...”

“... the press or publicity. He ran 10 Downing Street in sedentary, Asquithian style when the spirit of Lord George was urgently required. Among those who generally took a sceptical view of Attlee was Hugh Dalton. A bully, intriguer and relentless self-publicist, Dalton had all the qualities Attlee lacked. Fame and notoriety buzzed around his head, and his claims ...”

“... the divine Jade from the very brink of nuptiality while her husband-to-have-been, the gutless Lord Mark Rand, gnashes his titled English gums helplessly. Given his class and country, the chances of Lord Mark not being scheming, weak, pale and under-equipped are nil. Lucky, Married Men, Sinners, Chances, The ...”

“... someone who admired Gilbert Elliot of Minto and was annoyed by Robert Dundas of Arniston, second Lord President. Quite a lot of Scottish writers on politics might fulfil these requirements. The militia was attractive to upper-class society because of the opportunities it gave for the exertion of patronage, to the intellectuals because it reaffirmed ...”

“... ancient civilisation. The Dilettanti travelled to Italy and Greece, drawing, measuring, reporting home, and came back laden with spoils for their private collections. Compared with their modern counterparts, scholars funded by Mellon, Ford, Guggenheim and the British Academy, the Dilettanti had a striking characteristic: they were not so much specialists as ...”

“... that Van Dyck had made her face too fat. She wrote to Sir Ralph Verney: ‘I am glad you have got home my picture, but I doubt he hath neither made it leaner nor fairer, but rich in jewels I am sure, but It is no great matter for another age to think me richer than I was.’ We need to be careful in deciding what meanings the clothes in his paintings may ...”