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“... Apple is out this month.) Less has been written about the history of working-class gardeners. As Margaret Willes acknowledges, the majority of the working classes didn’t have the time or money to cultivate a garden until the 20th century; the worst off, those in cramped tenements or industrial back-to-backs built in the 19th century, had little if any ...”

“... when shed by a notorious tough nut, such as Oliver Cromwell, Lord Eldon, Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher. The Protector was repeatedly denounced for his ostentatious pretences of piety and feeling: he was ‘fluent in his tears’, endowed with ‘spungy eyes and a supple conscience’. In The Masque of Anarchy, Shelley sneers at Lord Chancellor ...”

“... to fight the war declared with such bureaucratic precision some ten days later. As it turned out, Margaret Thatcher didn’t bother to declare war in 1982 so Sir Gerald’s advice wasn’t required. Nor was war declared against Iraq in 1991 or 1998 or even in the Balkans in 1999. This is not because the executive has any anxieties about the Royal Prerogative ...”

“... made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the vault of an outside privy. That’s the sort of court-room occasion the Victorians loved. Newspaper agitation for the commuting of death sentences ...”