“... of the jury’s power to determine its own verdict, free from the threat of punishment. But if William Penn were to preach at Gracechurch Street today, Mr Bushel and his fellows would be unable to afford him the protection of their special verdict, since the case – as a public order offence – would not come before a jury at all. The ink of the Criminal ...”

“... William Golding’s new novel, Fire Down Below is the third volume of a trilogy, the other parts being Rites of Passage and Close Quarters. The trilogy is about a voyage to Sydney in 1813, and a bald, merely literal account might run like this ... On the first page the hero appears, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, an unformed young man of good family who is going out to help govern New South Wales in an aged line-of-battle ship, Captain Anderson commander, and who has been given a book in which to record his journey by his godfather, an influential peer ...”

“... first peacetime, non-departmental intelligence organisation’.Fleming delivered the report to William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a much decorated First World War veteran who had been lobbying Roosevelt to establish an American spy agency separate from the Navy, War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of ...”

“... he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen ...”

“... and remained a champion.Purdy was born in Ohio in 1914, the second of three sons. His father, William, was a banker unwisely turned property developer. After William lost large sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful ...”

“... was a hoax. None of Joan Didion’s books has been long, exactly, not with the generous amounts of white space she provides, which serve as fresh linen and air conditioning after a day’s driving in the desert, some respite from the perils. But air conditioning, being a human enterprise, can go on the blink. Then the motel room becomes a furnace, and sooner ...”

“... judge and the ultimate policeman. We have seen all these scenarios before. All the extreme white supremacists will take to the streets, I guess.’In the rush to recognise Trump’s new victim status, nobody seemed to be thinking about his own invocations of brutality. Before he was banned from Twitter, he had been warned for ‘glorifying ...”

“... would a President who made law and order one of his principal planks explain on TV that senior White House staff were authorising burglary? As for his alleged ignorance, even Nixon accepted some responsibility for the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst after Ellsberg had embarrassed the Administration with the leaking of the ...”

“... from Kipling ironising in indulgent prose. When in India, he had visualised Parnellites such as William O’Brien and T.P. O’Connor as figures of fun: not now. The real force of the poem lay in a quality alien to the interests of Henley and Fitzroy Bell. When Fitzroy Bell saw it, ‘Cleared’ was in the Irish dialect Kipling used for his Irish soldiers ...”

“... Belchamber has no taste for games, girls or money; in his new introduction to the novel, Edmund White calls him a ‘sissy’, which is about right, though, oddly, Cissy is the name of the pitiless young woman Sainty is trapped into marrying. Sturgis never makes any play on this lurking pun, though as a treacherous and neglectful wife Cissy is a constant ...”

“... when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a single-engined Cessna airplane on the south lawn of the White House in 1994, jokers suggested it might be the CIA director trying to get an appointment with the president. The anti-Communist revolt that began at Herat in western Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach girls to ...”

“... William Ewart Gladstone​ , four times prime minister of Great Britain and Ireland, died of a cancer of the palate on the 19th of May 1898. Ascension Day. It was fitting, Bill’s father said, for a Christian gentleman. It was at moments like these, he thought, when you could detect a pattern in the world. Now they were travelling to stand with the crowds and bear witness at Mr Gladstone’s funeral ...”

“... trips back down the path. Across the road her companion waits, a solid middle-aged man with bright white hair and glasses, a sports outfitter perhaps, the secretary of a golf club, even chairman of the parish council, though there is something slightly seedy or lavatorial about him but nothing to suggest he is a reporter or a photographer on the Daily ...”

“... she has painted a boy with a face of conspicuous sweetness, gentle and shy: a black coat, white cuffs falling over those exquisite, boneless, long-fingered hands that only portrait painters have ever seen. In the posed portraits, he is always smiling: faintly, perhaps; impatiently, perhaps. Then there is a sketch taken from life, 1793, in the National ...”

“... sense, though, Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton ...”