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“... czar General Barry McCaffrey in 1996. ‘This is not a medicine. This is a cruel hoax.’ Our own Home Secretary endorsed this line after his son’s arrest for a drug offence in 1997. Ann ‘zero-tolerance’ Widdecombe is even more opposed to it (except, it seems, when used by Shadow Cabinet colleagues and other supposedly ‘educated, articulate ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”

“... part in the brutal suppression of the rebels in 1857, leaving a graphic account in his letters home of killings and public hangings, which, the paper pointed out, would be seen as war crimes today. Cameron’s press office declined to comment. After all, the PM is apparently also related to Moses, Catherine the Great, William IV and Boris Johnson, and in ...”

“... up, in a quite different sense, an elderly man who has collapsed at the urinal. This is Charles, Lord Nantwich, who also swims at the Corry, and is looking for someone to write his biography: he hires Will. Charles’s diaries are in counterpoint to Will’s narrative, describing life as a gay man in Britain when gay sex was a crime. Yet the novel suggests ...”

“... so concerned about the situation that he appointed the veteran Tory politician and entrepreneur Lord Young to report on the state of health and safety legislation and ‘the rise of the compensation culture over the last decade’. Young reported that the problem, fuelled as it was by media stories, was ‘one of perception rather than reality’. Nothing ...”

“... Empire. Their ideas were no less hierarchical and authoritarian than those of George III and Lord North ... had Burke been in office during the American Revolution, we might merely have had to antedate his counter-revolutionary Toryism by some twenty years.’ This was a reference to Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in ...”

“... to accomplish, entailed a Parliamentary union between Peelites like Gladstone and Whigs like Lord John Russell. The Gladstonian Liberal Party, which was to dominate Victorian politics, was conceived in the Ayes lobby that night in 1846: it was their baby. When the baby grew up, it duly encountered its own midlife crisis. In 1886 it was the Liberal Party ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... accordance with international standards. This impeccable statement of principle, which was made by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, in a speech on 25 June to the International Criminal Law Association, was widely reported. What was not reported was his attempt in the same speech to fit into the same principled framework the government’s policy of ...”

“... 1982 is not a promising year for anniversaries. Almost the only one is just approaching. The Home Office and the Foreign Office were both founded in 1782 – products of a short-lived Whig ministry. This earth-shaking event is to be celebrated by a series of lectures for each Office. I was invited to give a lecture and was then struck off when I revealed ...”

“... Ransome his entire life savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant ...”

“... disturbed the cream-coloured courser tends to run away at speed, rather than take to the wing. Its home territory is open, dry semi-desert, chiefly in North Africa, with a range extending east to India; but on extremely rare occasions – once every five to ten years, perhaps – an individual turns up in Britain. I’m not alone in putting it in the most ...”

“... may be in two minds; at least King Aubrey would have wielded the sceptre with more panache than Lord Rothermere on the throne of Hungary. Herbert was the son of the fourth Earl of Carnarvon. His half-brother, the fifth Earl, was the co-finder of Tutankhamen’s tomb. His nephew, the sixth Earl, once kept him under observation of a sort, in ...”

“... London. ‘Lodgings’ sound modest enough, a bit like actors’ digs; but a few years ago I got home from my summer holiday to find messages on the answerphone from several broadsheet legal correspondents. After a false start (I phoned a journalist friend to ask what this was likely to be about. ‘Haven’t you seen?’ he said. ‘Judge and rentboy ...”

“... a hanging,’ he writes, ‘that James and John were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and [Lord John Russell, the home secretary] could neither be bothered to save them, nor dared to court public opprobrium by changing the law.’ This was ‘one of the great injustices of British legal history – the judicial ...”