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“... one wants to know. The first is the date of the entries; the second is the age of the author. James Lees-Milne was 36, rising 37, when he started this record on 1 January 1946. He had, however, kept a diary before, during the years of the war, and abandoned it only three months earlier, so he starts here with a practised hand. The wartime diaries have ...”

“... child was Georgiana’s (the event has echoes of the ‘warming-pan affair’ which embarrassed James II’s Queen). Having given her husband a long-wanted male heir, the Duchess naturally expected him to pay off her prodigious gambling debts. This he failed to do. Soon she became pregnant again, this time by a future prime minister, Earl Grey, who in years ...”

“... kami sa IOWA, pare ko,’ laughed one, and they clattered off over the Pacific. Prayer ‘Lord, Give me back my body And give me back my voice.’ ‘son, I would give your body back But alas I have no choice. ‘For you have pawned your arms and legs, Your fingers and your toes And you sold your voice to the bottle-boy For twenty-one pesos.’ ‘Oh ...”

“... niece Anna Lefroy, born Anna Austen in 1793, the eldest child of Jane Austen’s brother James. According to family tradition, the play, though written down by Jane Austen, was not her brainchild. Anna, who knew Grandison as familiarly in youth as her aunt did, was always understood to have devised the play as a child and to have dictated it to Jane ...”

“... Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative talent, and perhaps that a creative talent never cramped a military one. The singularity of their careers has earned them a place ...”

“... nativity. Jesus was probably born in Nazareth. There was indeed a census, but in the year 6 of Our Lord, and in the province of Syria, not Galilee. Herod was already dead by then. He died ten years earlier, four years Before Christ. There was a Pontius Pilate. He was in office from 26-36. Jesus might have been only 20 when he died – you can hang on to the ...”

“... When the publishers announced yet another book by Lord Denning, the fourth in three years, and one with the alarming title What next in the Law, I recall feeling a sense of foreboding: what next indeed? Recalled shortly after publication because of some unfortunate remarks about juries and the nature of society (subjects upon which judges, if one reflects on the matter, are not likely to be well-informed), What next in the Law is once more available, albeit with the naughty bits removed ...”

“... The absurdity of ex-judge James Pickles is not that, the son of a mayor of Halifax and himself an Oxford graduate, he rails endlessly against the domination of the Bench by the Oxbridge upper middle class. There’s nothing wrong with being a traitor to one’s class. As the left-wing QC D. N. Pritt told the right-wing Labour leader Ernest Bevin, it was the only thing the two of them had in common ...”

“... around to construct any number of theories, from either point of view. Was it, or was it not, Lord Lucan who murdered the nanny Sandra Rivett? In the 13 years since she was found in the US mailbag at 46 Lower Belgrave Street in London there has been no new evidence. Patrick Marnham’s only novelty is the evidence from Taki, the Spectator ...”

“... of miscellaneous essays by MacCarthy, all of which have been collected before, and a memoir by Lord David Cecil, of which a portion appeared as preface to an earlier selection. Desmond MacCarthy was probably the best-known London literary journalist of his time, and it is clearly the view of publisher and editor that his influence can be extended into our ...”

“... unearthed tons of documents from British archives and conducted two interviews with the bewildered Lord Penney. (The report and evidence of the Royal Commission are not in the British Library catalogue.) Amid the tumult over the Royal Commission’s hearings, Mrs Arnold brought out her A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapon Trials in Australia ...”

“... among the peasantry that communicating with God through a priest and doing their manorial lord’s work for free was something they acquiesced to, rather than the natural state of things, but these were customs and rituals linked directly to essential matters, eternal life and bread.With us, it is the reverse. Our practices, lost not as a direct ...”

“... faintly ludicrous figure, the Sultan of Brunei, was in December 1985. Until around then – as Lord Chalfont obligingly mentions in the course of a work that can otherwise only be compared with The Lives of the Saints – the general view (endorsed not only by a public opinion poll but by me as well) was that the Sultan’s kingdom was ‘somewhere in the ...”

“... at all: in other words, that the notion of a sustained Parliamentary opposition to James I and Charles I, leading inevitably to a military conflict fought over constitutional principles, cannot be sustained. Indeed, they look with deep suspicion at any notion of inevitability. They admit that the Crown was faced with serious problems – of ...”

“... magic’ of medieval days. During the Gordon Riots of 1780 it was the holy refuge on which Lord Mansfield, deputising for the Lord Chancellor, at last subsided after being manhandled by the mob in ‘a sudden flare-up of the old Eurosceptic anti-Catholic mania’. There he sat, the ...”