“... of the humiliation of some over-mighty cabinet colleague – Geoffrey Howe, say, or Jim Prior or John Moore or Francis Pym – I could picture the scene only too well:I can do no better at this stage than describe my own punishment chamber, which I call the Lady Chapel.   This is not blasphemy on my part. It is a chapel to the Lady (the Lady I serve) in ...”

“... the king’s presumed supremacy of the Church, his divorce and the Boleyn marriage. Thomas More, John Fisher and the Carthusian monks whom Henry had executed were now cast as religious martyrs. Henry himself, worse than Nero, was guilty of incest and adultery, and heading straight to hell. Pole’s manuscript was suffused with a sense of his own aristocratic ...”

“... was widely mourned. ‘His tireless work to deliver safe consumption rooms,’ the first minister, John Swinney, said, ‘leaves an important legacy which will be remembered.’ By the time the Thistle opened this year, the tide seemed to be changing in many countries, with abstinence-based schemes on the rise and SDCFs branded as ‘state-sponsored ...”

“... in the grip of several stout bobbies, her skirt round her waist while one especially beefy constable administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite ...”

“... with a naturalistic account of sex and sexual pleasure that there was in France. The radical John Wilkes’s venture into sexual literature is so marginal that it doesn’t figure here at all; the conflation of liberty and libertinage in Don Giovanni’s famous aria would have fallen on uncomprehending ears. We do not quite know, as Porter and Hall point ...”

“... opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their ...”

“... implications of Blake’s debt to Macpherson’s Ossian. Of Williams’s first trio of writers, John Barrell, on the period 1730-1780, applies theory to practice most fully and intelligently. Barrell’s ‘Equal, Wide Survey’ deals with topics associated with Williams – pastoral poetry and language – but handles them in an unabashed scholarly ...”

“... I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very ...”

“... in the county were killed for want of fodder. By the end of winter in this period, according to John Higgs’s The Land (1964), every blade of grass had been eaten and the animals were forced to follow the plough looking for upturned roots.The social structure of the country had changed, the population had grown, the plough had been improved, the threshing ...”

“... own man, Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, a retired High Court Judge. He was to be supported by John Sentamu, the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, Tom Cook, former Deputy Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, and Richard Stone, Chairman of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality. The Lawrences decided that Sir William was an ...”

“... Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe and humourless ...”

“... pack up and go home. She will like the illustrated edition of Priestley’s English Journey. John Hadfield, the picture editor, has found photographs – some taken by people like Humphrey Spender and Bill Brandt who went to the North because they had read Priestley’s book – which illustrate the text with astonishing exactness. Yet the photographs of ...”

“... Many parish priests might feel reluctant to terrorise their simple flocks, much as a village constable refrains from meddling and quarrelling more than need be with the neighbours among whom he has to live. Still, death and judgment and perdition were a divine’s one opportunity, ‘in a harsh hierarchical society’, to proclaim Christian equality. For ...”

“... is found dead and blackened in his bed and in due course so is his grandson. Later, I dabbled in John Evelyn’s Sylva. Reprehensibly perhaps, I’ve never paid as much attention to my surroundings on a country walk as I have to descriptions of the natural world in books, all the better in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t ...”

“... thinks the same way. These may be provincial views but they are not necessarily mistaken. Pope John Paul evidently does not think they are. His journey to Central America was that of an enraged (and conceivably ill-advised) chief constable come to impose order on an unruly populace and on his own badly-disciplined rank ...”