“... 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 ...”

“... a gun to my father’s head and they ripped his shirt off,’ she says. ‘He had a tattoo of our Lord on the cross. They said: “You Fenian bastard, you have an hour to get out.”’ By the time the children got home, their father had left for his mother’s house in Catholic West Belfast. Other local Catholic families ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had always assumed that this fairly bleak period in his life came to an end with his portrayal of Lord Raglan in Tony Richardson’s Charge of the Light Brigade in 1967, and then his success in Forty Years On the following year. It was certainly clear from Richardson’s film that Gielgud was beginning to act in a different way. Indeed, he was hardly acting ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to ...”

“... no doubt difficult being an official biographer, and anyone in this position is bound to remember Lord Birkenhead’s fate at the hands of Kipling’s daughter. The temptation must be to rely heavily on the subject’s papers and memoirs and avoid seeing too much of other people’s points of view. This seems to have been the case with Mr Rhodes James, who ...”

“... and to abbreviate ‘edepol’ to ‘pol’ (to which we might compare the tendency for ‘Lord have mercy’ to become the genteel ‘lawks’ in the mouths of women in 19th-century fiction). Polytheists could indeed at times swear more colourful holy oaths than monotheists, just because they could reinforce their vows by appealing to such a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a large number of people, with or without the inspiration and example of Sir Oswald Mosley and Lord Rothermere, are both zealous Fascists and devout Christians.’ But in 1934 ‘the inspiration and example’ of Mosley would have been words drily to call up rot dry and wet. The caddish effrontery of Mosley’s private life (Eliot made the relevance of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”