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“... to light, did Attwell, Donaldson and Style take their place in the dock of Court Eight at the Old Bailey. The length of time it had taken to get the men to trial was interpreted by some as indicating a certain lack of enthusiasm for the task in hand on the part of the Crown. And there were other, graver doubts about the prosecution: first, why was the case ...”

“... and therefore suffering from the same nostalgia syndrome). In a review (in the New Republic) of Anthony Lane’s book Nobody’s Perfect, Thomson, aged sixtyish, compares a non-exhaustive list of the movies available for Pauline Kael to review in the 1970s with those reviewed in the New Yorker by Lane, aged between 30 and 40. Here’s his 1970s list: Bonnie ...”

“... apt to rise above the call of loyalty to the House of Commons, and to the democratic process. Sir Anthony Kershaw, instead of asking ministers questions arising from the document, handed it to the Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, and his department. Let no one kid themselves that, in our system, Select Committees of the House of Commons with an in-built ...”

“... Frolik said, had been passing secrets to the Czechoslovaks since 1954. During his trial at the Old Bailey, Owen acknowledged receiving money but denied that he had given away any classified information. He was acquitted. Frolik also named a Labour minister, the postmaster general, John Stonehouse – who, he said, had been recruited in the late 1950s after ...”

“... survived. The four young men were charged under the law on joint enterprise and tried at the Old Bailey earlier this year. They all pleaded not guilty to murder and wounding with intent to cause serious bodily harm. The four weren’t described in court as gang members but, accurately enough, as a tightly knit group of friends. The prosecution emphasised ...”

“... to be done, it should be done properly on Wimbledon Common and not in an underhand way at the Old Bailey.’ The diary was a theatre of the absurd which Waugh occasionally took on tour in a kind of performance journalism, most notably during the 1979 general election. This was part of his ‘oblique, crablike’ pursuit of Jeremy Thorpe, the former leader of ...”

“... props in the Ken Tynan legend assembly-kit, along with the Mickey Mouse watch and effete-aesthete Anthony Blanche outfits he wore at Oxford, and, later, the poolstick collection of headmaster’s canes he kept handy to beat women’s bottoms. The cigarettes eventually killed him, but it is only with one in his hand that he looks fully activated, in ...”

“... making its evidence public (which included Keeler’s perjury), and sent a message to the Old Bailey which emphasised that they were not holding that Keeler was lying. Mandy Rice-Davies later wrote that her testimony in the Ward case had been untrue. Vicky Barrett, a prostitute who had described Ward as a conventional pimp, did the same. Of the two ...”

“... early 1970s but loathed it. ‘Never again,’ he said, no matter the money. A number of writers, Anthony Thwaite among them, taught in Kuwait or the desert emirates and had stories of segregated classrooms and beheadings.‘You’re a traveller?’ Dorothy Pritchett said to me, and, giggling in anticipation, ‘Do you have a rooksack?’ Puffing his pipe and ...”

“... performance of Wilde’s Salome. Allan and her producer sued and the case was tried at the Old Bailey. Lord Alfred Douglas presented himself in the witness-box for the defence, as an expert on the corrupting power of his former friend. Wilde, indeed, was ‘a diabolical influence on everyone he met’ and ‘the greatest force for evil that has appeared in ...”

“... public officials had pleaded guilty to misconduct. The first big Elveden trial began at the Old Bailey in October 2013. Commonly known as the ‘phone hacking trial’, it put Coulson, Brooks and Goodman in the dock for the alleged corruption of public officials. Jurors were shown the emails that started Elveden. In January 2003 Goodman asked Coulson for ...”

“... crisply. Thomas Carlyle certainly thought so: the poem, he declared, was ‘all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and only wants forgetting’. It is not in fact that easy to tell the story in ten lines – Browning’s most concise effort took him 43, and he could afford to leave out a lot of things he knew he was going to ...”

“... A suspect was apprehended: a Chinese exile called Wang Yam. He was charged with murder. The Old Bailey jury was told he had battered Chappelow to death ‘like a seal pup on an ice floe, with more blood than Sweeney Todd’. Very unusually, a large part of his trial was held in camera, because apparently Wang Yam had some link with the security ...”

“... to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when ...”

“... Roth and William Styron had pinned up above their desks a famous Flaubert aphorism, which Blake Bailey quotes in his Roth biography: ‘Be orderly and regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild and original in your work.’ It is a wonderful, uplifting quote, even if the translation seems to be a little adapted. ‘Violent’ or ...”