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“... thanked me a thousand times’). Then there is the splendid book edited by Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers, which consists mainly of soldiers’ and sailors’ letters and diaries, British, Anzac and Turkish – no French or Indian, apart from a couple of Indian officers in the British army – arranged chronologically, with an editorial ...”

“... in 1988, it was building upon approaches already established in the studies of C.L. Barber, E.K. Chambers and Enid Welsford which related Shakespeare’s plays to Elizabethan calendrical customs. What distinguished Laroque’s book, however, was the breadth of its documentation and discussion, which spanned the entire corpus of Shakespeare’s writings, and ...”

“... unbroken series of portraits of law officers of the Crown on the walls of the attorney-general’s chambers in Buckingham Gate, and in the National Portrait Gallery, all that survives is a single, almost certainly posthumous, stage-villain caricature. Robertson fixes the evening in Gray’s Inn as the book’s moment of conception. I wonder if he also ...”

“... which had first excused and then validated everything from the Nuremberg Laws to the gas chambers and might readily have made collaborators of families like Harvey’s if Hitler had crossed the Channel. But it didn’t feel like that either to him or to me. What it presented me with was my first existential dilemma. If I now told Harvey I was ...”

“... began to understand. Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now in his nineties and still occasionally practising, came to Balliol as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand in 1928. He boxed, rowed and through the Carlton Club became a protégé of Nancy Astor. Their friendship ...”

“... an individualistic and conservative project, devised outside the offices of governments and the chambers of parliaments and designed to stem the postwar tide of socialism and statism. Through it, he argues, ‘conservatives enshrined human rights as European values in the service of a nostalgic Christian vision of the European legal order, not a liberal ...”

“... royal prerogative, that has shaped the British constitution.In 1636 a London trader called Richard Chambers sued the mayor for having wrongfully imprisoned him for refusing to pay ship money. His case was that the tax was itself unlawful, having been levied by the Crown without the authority of Parliament. The court refused to hear the argument. ‘There is a ...”

“... royal prerogative, that has shaped the British constitution.In 1636 a London trader called Richard Chambers sued the mayor for having wrongfully imprisoned him for refusing to pay ship money. His case was that the tax was itself unlawful, having been levied by the Crown without the authority of Parliament. The court refused to hear the argument. ‘There is a ...”

“... As I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare on the train there was a woman sitting near me doing a deal on the phone. She was getting agitated. ‘But I have to transfer the money to Mr Shakespeare himself,’ she said. ‘No … Listen, I really need to speak to Mr Shakespeare. Can you put me through? Hello? … Hello?’ Then the line went dead ...”

“... difficult, at least in the law, to bridge those last hundred-odd years. The senior clerk in the chambers where I was a pupil in the 1960s had started work towards 1890 as a boy in the Temple, where he had been trained to write copperplate with the steel-nibbed pen that he would still use to copy out pleadings and opinions for signature when the typist was ...”

“... with an agonising jolt, like the victims of strappado, once a common practice in its torture chambers, where prisoners whose hands were pinioned behind their back were dropped at the end of a rope tied to their wrists? And what of the moral high ground on which Mandela and his vision of reconciliation are now enshrined? It’s right – and proper – to ...”

“... She detested getting older, and lashed out at the young and pretty gentlewomen of her private chambers. For the first time we have an accurate and critical account of the audiences between Elizabeth and the French ambassador de Maisse in 1597. Although once, through mistranslation and misinterpretation, Elizabeth at 64 appeared before de Maisse in a state ...”

“... concentration camp’: ‘all they need now,’ she adds, ‘is to start designing gas chambers.’ Outrage provokes this kind of hyperbole: outrage at colleagues obsessed with finding new and dramatic angles on ‘the story’ but unwilling to help alleviate the suffering; at Western human rights agencies endlessly issuing reams of anti-Russian ...”

“... It was indeed organised by an official from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Union – Pat Chambers – but he listened carefully to the workers and planned the strike meticulously. The Grapes of Wrath is richer in detail, more humane, less philosophically arid and generally more interesting than its predecessor, not least because by then Steinbeck’s ...”

“... in Twickenham and Pope as often coming to Mansfield’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and his chambers at 5 King’s Bench Walk, where he coached Mansfield in oratory. Among other admiring verses, one of Pope’s Imitations of Horace described Mansfield, still at the bar, as ‘his Country’s pride’. For his part, Mansfield acted as counsel for ...”