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“... Justice we are even given a ‘black smudge of pubic hair’ – but they still feel more at home grousing about the lower orders or condemning as racist the charge that the Metropolitan Police Force is institutionally racist. One might define fiction as the kind of writing in which it is impossible to tell the truth and very hard to make a mistake. If ...”

“... will be locked up in the hands of [the booksellers], the Tonsons and Lintots of the age,’ Lord Camden explained, ‘till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are.’ The power that the intellectual property regime gave to trade privileges, at the expense of royal privileges, seemed to degrade the nobility of ...”

“... Hansford Johnson – caught, to begin with, in the unselfconscious prose of her adolescent Boots Home diaries, 8” x 5”, a week to a spread – gives us privileged entry into the textures and flavours of a vanished time, the nuances of its class structure and language. You might have guessed that a girl in the 1920s and early 1930s could have ‘a topping ...”

“... cigarette. ‘Officer, you got me. You’d better send me back to the UK. Deport me. I want to go home. By BA, preferably.’ They still had a smoking section. She’d hoped for better. She narrowed her eyes and gave me another mean look, then told me to wait while she left to make a phone call. Twenty minutes later she returned and grudgingly dismissed me ...”

“... noting the ‘gravity’ of the offences. In August, the Labour Party’s spokesman on home affairs, John Fraser, wrote to the home secretary, Robert Carr, about the cases. The Sunday Times report on Fraser’s letter said that he had asked Carr ‘to pay special regard to the method of proof used by transport ...”

“... As Macaulay points out, there were plenty of other onlookers ready to risk being Godfreyed. At home, newspaper reports, medals, maps and eulogies combined to bring the public in on the action that they were now directly helping to finance.Eighty years on and several charters later, the bank had become a byword for solidity. People started using the phrase ...”

“... and the kinds of gift they could demand for their service. By contrast, William de Longchamp, lord chancellor in the late 12th century, tried to improve his public image by writing his own praise poems and paying French musicians to sing them in the streets.Medieval minstrels left few written traces, and the references that do appear in texts from the ...”

“... and A Newspaper History of England 1792-1793 (1967); Clive Emsley, in his influential essay ‘The Home Office and its Sources of Information and Investigation 1791-1801’, in the English Historical Review for 1979; and Emily Lorraine de Montluzin in her study The Anti-Jacobins 1798-1800 (1988). At the very end of 1788 George III was still apparently mad, and ...”

“... Wolsey took his place in a genuinely conciliar regime. Far from exploiting his position as Lord Chancellor to harry his political rivals in Star Chamber, he demonstrated to the rich and powerful, without fear or favour, their equality before the law with the poor and weak. What then of his legendary success in removing or isolating his enemies from the ...”

“... patriarchal conception of marriage. After 1800, and especially during the long tenure of Lord Chancellor Eldon (1801-27), an increasingly conservative reaction set in: even as the courts continued to enforce such contracts, they so hedged them with restrictions that the effect, in Staves’s reading, was the ‘reimposition of deep patriarchal ...”

“... came in handy, you might say, in lordly imputations of sexual inadequacy, as when Fielding called Lord Hervey Lord Didapper. The Earl was giving Dryden the ‘scribbling author’ the sort of lofty treatment which commoners like Dryden himself, as well as Swift and Pope after him, liked to hand down to still lower ...”

“... as a young American student, George Ticknor, was to note on meeting him in 1815. ‘I have seen Lord Byron,’ Lady Blessington recorded in her diary on 1 April 1823, ‘and am disappointed.’ It is hardly surprising that people should have confused the poet with his heroes. After the success of the first two cantos of the Pilgrimage, he churned out the ...”

“... of the historian for the showier trappings of the historical novelist. In his capacity as Lord Thomas of the Centre for Policy Studies, he has indeed made public his desire for a new, self-confident mode of national historiography, and the question arises inevitably: is this an earnest of his intentions? The first chapter, entitled ‘The City of ...”

“... been an important centre of diffusion for enlightened ideas, was plunged into revolt, as was the home of Rousseau’s ‘helvetic muse’, Geneva. Finally the world, essentially aristocratic and monarchical, which the men and women of the Enlightenment had struggled to improve collapsed in a revolution whose aim was to transform, not reform, society. It ...”

“... In 1967 I joined the Literature panel, from which, however, I resigned after a few months because Lord Goodman, who was then chairman of the Arts Council, did not convince me, as he did the rest of the panel, that the Council should withhold subsidy from a magazine that held a competition for poems written under the influence of drugs. I kept thinking of ...”