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“... a day. Jyoti Basu, the astringent, unsmiling Communist chief minister of West Bengal, a barrister from London and a bhadralok (that is, a member of the liberal, patrician middle class), whose first name means ‘light’, began to be called Andhakaar, or ‘Darkness’. Bombay, on the other hand, began to dazzle; I have no memory of it ever not ...”

“... paper’s first lead review was of More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, done by Augustine Birrell, a barrister, a Liberal MP, and the author of a volume of essays entitled Obiter Dicta. The first poem was by Harold Begbie. It was an anthem for Empire, and May succinctly describes it as ‘rather an absurd poem’. English studies, as an academic ...”

“... topics: Labour Party infighting and malfeasance by British Muslims. Both cases were heard by the barrister Richard Mawrey, sitting as election commissioner, a man not shy of expressing strong opinions and with a knack for the headline-friendly phrase. In the Birmingham case, in 2005, Mawrey found six Labour councillors guilty of organising thousands of ...”

“... its first nuclear device, her father, then prime minister, responded ‘immediately’. He held secret talks with China, made a deal of sorts with Libya, struck an agreement with France to purchase a plutonium-reprocessing plant and hired Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist then employed in Holland and now regarded, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as a parent of ...”

“... The Week and its well-placed informants went after them ferociously, breaking news from the secret German opposition and exposing furtive British moves towards a pact with the Third Reich. A special target was Lady Astor, who was antisemitic and violently hostile to both France and Soviet Russia, Britain’s only plausible allies in a war with ...”

“... in the political wilderness for years. This didn’t stop the Met’s Special Branch keeping secret files on all of them.Abbott’s parents, a factory worker and a nurse, were Windrush-generation migrants from Jamaica. Like most of their fellow migrants, they were Labour voters and deeply aspirational. To escape the racism of the rental market, they ...”

“... view, I entirely accept. It has been my experience that most middle-class families have some “secret” of this kind in their midst.’ Ivy Compton-Burnett had published ten novels before the 33-year-old Angus Wilson sat down one Sunday and wrote ‘Raspberry Jam’ – to which he then added seven other short stories at successive weekends. In ...”

“... bicycle. (Cycling also gave him his first breakthrough in journalism: the son of a feckless barrister, he had left school at sixteen to write freelance articles; a Coventry publishing firm made him editor of Bicycling News, then helped him set up Answers to Correspondents.) He bought his first motor car in 1899 and had ten of them by 1911. He got the ...”

“... a sluggish professional launch in his twenties (the 1790s) as an unimpressive and underemployed barrister. His keen literary interests – folk and literary ballads, the new German medievalism – were still a sideline. But after 1800 he plunged for a decade into an orgy of bookmaking that was also literary revivalism, a grandiose project of ‘a complete ...”

“... with iron bars to break the knees of lily-white dancers; in one, the prima had a terrible secret: she was “half-caste”, a word I trembled to write down, as I knew from experience how completely it enraged my mother.’ The humour and the danger in these sentences doesn’t come from the narrator: it is smuggled in via quotation marks, from the ...”

“... regent, the prince was desperate to prevent the Post revealing any more about his awkward secret. He threatened the conductor of the paper, John Benjafield, with prosecution; Benjafield responded by threatening more disclosures. The prince offered to buy Benjafield’s shares in the newspaper; Benjafield named an absurdly inflated price; the prince ...”

“... with his subject is balanced by what is often an astringent critique – O’Connell’s work as a barrister and the imprint of this on his politics is a case in point, as are his Catholicism, personal and political, and his relationship (not least in financial terms) with his family. MacDonagh’s title, The Hereditary Bondsman, comes from O’Connell’s ...”

“... bog and mountain scenery that was somehow far more innocent and easy and obvious than the stealthy secret variety we have here. I would like to go back to Galway and spend a little time there. Ten days later, he described the Wicklow mountains: I walk immeasurably & unrestrainedly, hills and dales, all day, and back with a couple of pints from the ...”

“... He then applied to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that holding part of his trial in secret had infringed his right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. We are still waiting for the result of his application. There are practices in our jurisdiction far more radical than holding a hearing in private, for ...”

“... alongside melodramatic fiction. Mary Braddon, for example, best-selling author of Lady Audley’s Secret and a bohemian variant on Jane Eyre, went to live with the publisher John Maxwell, who had ‘five children, and a wife in an Irish lunatic asylum’; after 13 years the wife died and she could at last marry him. It is little wonder that she was interested ...”