“... the secret financial relationships of MPs. Summoning his allies, including Lady Thatcher and Lord Archer in the House of Lords, Hamilton inspired an amendment to the Defamation Act then going through Parliament. The amendment, which was drummed through both Houses by the Tory majority, who behaved exactly as if they were being whipped, gave MPs the right ...”

“... his father absent for long periods of time (eluding arrest for past crimes, making money to send home, or selling bogus oil-rights to suckers), Jim dropped out of high school to support his family as a bellboy at the Hotel Texas, and quickly learnt how to supply his guests with more than just the keys to their rooms. According to Thompson’s latest ...”

“... For a short time she had fantasised that I would many M., a young man who would inherit a stately home. My grandmother dubbed him ‘the Duke’, no doubt hoping that the flippant nickname would disguise the fervour of her hopes for me. When she realised I wasn’t interested, she joked that it would be better if I married a sweep. Sweeps would always be in ...”

“... knowledge of history. In his youth her husband had turned down Peel’s offer of the post of Irish Lord of the Treasury, and Peel thereafter ignored him, but is said to have prevented him from fighting what would have been the last duel in England. Gregory was later a Trustee of the National Gallery and Governor of Ceylon. She read the books in his excellent ...”

“... is often deeply amused by Chapman’s later ability to interact on equal terms with mandarins like Lord Rothschild: having a bounder for a subject means there is a Flashman-like fascination in seeing just how far he can go. But this shouldn’t blind one to his astonishing abilities. Once inducted into the espionage world he soon became a dab hand at the black ...”

“... soon enough and Jones returned to writing, publishing two sub-Walter Scott epic poems, Corayda and Lord Lindsay, and most ambitiously, My Life, a verse novel cum autobiography which Taylor sees as having affinities with Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’. The main character is Jones’s idealised version of himself as the aristocrat beset by misfortunes who ...”

“... Alas, dignified mutism as a nation is compatible with and may even cause constant pandemonium at home. On that sounding-board of the national soul, the Edinburgh Scotsman’s letters page, I doubt if a week has passed since Scott’s time without its quota of resentful jibes about non-equality and Southern arrogance. Back in 1925 we find MacDiarmid scorning ...”

“... when I was at school and doing the (somehow obligatory) amateur dramatics I was in William Douglas Home’s The Chiltern Hundreds with one of my lines ‘That’s the cross I’ve got to bear.’ A devout Christian at the time I felt I couldn’t say this line, my notion of piety having much more to do with dubious issues of conscience like this than with ...”

“... The High Court can order one, as it did recently on the Hillsborough disaster. Of that case Lord Judge, then lord chief justice, held that ‘it seems to us elementary that the emergence of fresh evidence which may reasonably lead to the conclusion that the substantial truth about how an individual met his death was ...”

“... period and the identity of characters in the new section – it was 1926, it turned out, and ‘Lord Valance’ was not the Lord Valance of the last section. Even a man’s apparently demented cries of ‘Rubbish! Rubbish!’ were misleading, since he was merely shouting at a dog of that name. These alienation effects ...”

“... peak when they go riding in Rotten Row and, in the presence of royalty, Gladys spots a friend from home and unleashes an ear-splitting ‘Cooee!’ Despite her mother-in-law’s best efforts to house-train her, Gladdie seems to be incorrigible, and she begins to pine away under the icy blast of their dislike. Eventually she runs off in despair and fakes ...”

“... names,’ Amis confides at one point, ‘it’s amazing how it lowers . . . the tone’ (Lord David ‘Cess-hole’, for example). Getting the tone down to sewer-level became an end in itself, with much verbal japing along the way: ‘Fucky Nell’, ‘a bit of an R-scrawler’ and so on. Above all, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was an abattoir ...”

“... than Walpole’s time. No doubt there were always enterprising families who made model theatres at home, but as a commercial product they first appeared in 1811, after which they rapidly acquired a standard form.The theatre itself, like its full-size equivalent, had proscenium doors and galleries. The base was wood, the interior paper, and it came with scenery ...”

“... joins the celebrations of harmony at the back of a polished Mercedes and at the bar of the luxury Lord Charles Hotel. The papers dwell in infinite detail on the refined menu, not failing to notice the visitors’ preference for the carvery. How much it costs the taxpayer to accommodate the ‘poor ANC’ in style provides another headline. In the ...”

“... heard about ‘people who sold surplus factory items on a television programme called Shopping at Home. Models walked back and forth in front of the camera wearing clothes or jewellery that hadn’t sold in stores, while the announcer worked up his audience by saying that the item’s retail value was a hundred dollars, but anyone who called in the next ten ...”