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“... I should declare an interest. Anthony Sampson in The Changing Anatomy of Britain quotes Lord Denning dismissing attacks on a class-based judiciary: ‘The youngsters believe that we come from a narrow background – it’s all nonsense – they get it from that man Griffith.’ Lord Reid was a distinguished top judge ...”

“... kept during her travels on the Continent in 1801-3 and to Russia from 1805 to 1807, and sent home to her family. Parts of these journals have already been published, in Thomas Sadleir’s An Irish Peer on the Continent (1920) and in Lady Londonderry and H.M. Hyde’s The Russian Journals and Letters of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (1934). For the present ...”

“... black knickers for state funerals, tartan for Balmoral, knickers printed all over with corgis for home, and appliquéd with real holly for Christmas, ‘which is why she keeps her Christmas message very short’. She gets into a terrible flap trying to decide which pair to wear for a visit to the child narrator’s school. The little girl ‘puts her at her ...”

“... a term coined by Anthony Verrier to cover the Cabinet Office, the upper echelons of the Home Office, Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence, and the ‘Permanent Secretaries Club’, the very senior civil servants who are often called the ‘Mandarins’; the City of London, led by the Bank of England and its Governor, the press; and think tanks and ...”

“... appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord Goodman had drafted it, even though it comes from his office. (It was Hailsham who said in June 1963: ‘A great party is not to be brought down by a woman of easy virtue and a proved liar.’ Something of a sting at the time.) The idea conveyed is that ...”

“... the Mansion House was not struck by a thunderbolt on the night in 1936 when the Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, told the guests at the Lord Mayor’s Dinner: ‘His Majesty’s Judges are satisfied with the almost universal admiration in which they are held.’ Or, for that matter, on the same occasion in 1953 when the ...”

“... Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere. Reed has been a justice since February 2012, making him (with ...”

“... Special Branch, which Ewing and Gearty describe as ‘the private political police force of the Home Secretary’, didn’t give it a stir, just in case. After one raid a senior police witness was asked what was seditious about Darwin’s Origin of Species, which he had taken away. He replied that he didn’t know. A pamphlet was then handed to him ‘with ...”

“... Hannay is acute and sensitive on Lady Holland and Lady Blessington in the early 19th century. Lord Egremont’s essay on Lady Desborough and ‘the Souls’ is delightful. Victoria Glendinning’s study of ‘Speranza’, Oscar Wilde’s mother, is a tour de force. But the talk itself, conversation as an art to be cultivated and passed on, eludes us. If ...”

“... That Diary is reproduced in this devotional work: an assembly of writings and addresses (at home and abroad) on Wodehouse, with the transcript of a seance thrown in. Devotional, did one say? Yes, but witty, sagacious and an example to the dons and soldiers tilling the same vineyard. We now learn that Richard Usborne (whom I have known since the days ...”

“... My dear friend Gerald, Lord Berners, died in 1950. I thought that not more than half a dozen people remembered him. But the centenary of his birth has brought him back into attention. There have been concerts of his music, performances of his ballets and an exhibition devoted to his life on the fifth floor of the Festival Hall ...”

“... that sending asylum seekers to Rwanda carries a real risk of their being sent back to their home countries to face death, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, contrary to the ‘non-refoulement’ principle of international law. The court held that the issue was not the good faith of the Rwandan government’s assurance that it would properly ...”

“... hopes and fantasies about their eventual place in the world. The story of Dick Whittington, fabled Lord Mayor of London, has for centuries helped underpin a belief that extreme social mobility always remains a strong possibility for everyone, however illusory the idea may often be in practice. Later, 19th-century adventure novels set in the past, such as ...”

“... 1980s responding ineffectively to growing tabloid contempt until, in 1989, Douglas Hurd set up a Home Office committee under David Calcutt QC to consider measures (including legislative measures) to protect individual privacy against the press. Calcutt was given a year to report, and it was while his committee was at work that David Mellor, then a junior ...”

“... with the remit contained in the white paper which set it up. It is not the leading judgment of Lord Parker which today merits rereading bur the second one, in which Lord Justice Diplock observed that what was in dispute was the last unclaimed prize of the constitutional conflicts of the 17th century. Government had ...”