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“... in rejecting the manuscript, advised Cornwell to change the sex of the male hero-narrator (Joe Constable) of the early draft of Postmortem. In the late Eighties this was flavour of the month advice. Another thing she did in the Eighties was to act as a ‘volunteer policewoman’, cruising in patrol cars in a semiofficial capacity. Judging by their initial ...”

“... and in a higher rhetorical style than is favoured by either. At its best, as in the essays on John Stow and William Camden, the method can produce work that is very vivid. Occasionally, the reader may be left wondering whether the vividness of the writing takes it a little bit further than the words of its source, or, as in the interesting essay on the ...”

“... listeners (some of whom have stayed regularly until the early hours of the morning) that the Chief Constable has seen fit to draft in a number of policemen ‘to maintain order and prevent damage’. The emblematic potential of the scene – the ‘immortal bird’ of poetry perched pluckily on the fiery snout of the dragon of technological progress – is not ...”

“... that nice Susannah York. Fielding died in 1754 and was succeeded at Bow Street by his half-brother John: ‘blind John’ as he had been since the age of 19, ‘Sir John’ as he became in 1761, after successfully agitating to be knighted so as to increase the prestige of his office. The ...”

“... own affair. ‘The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society,’ John Stuart Mill said, ‘is that which concerns others.’ What was done in secret was another matter. Secret ballots were pernicious, according to Mill, because they freed voters from ‘all sense of shame or responsibility’. ‘Everything secret,’ Lord ...”

“... it, as Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, and the arrival in 1605 of a man with a mission: John White, known to posterity as the ‘patriarch of Dorchester’. All Christians should live according to Christ’s teachings, lay up treasure in Heaven and follow God rather than man. Evidence of their doing so is less than universal. Yet sometimes we find ...”

“... corn. Does he own the farm? Has he been here long? Does he always dress like that? A painting by Constable, say, might provoke such questions; and even if no answers were obviously forthcoming you would nevertheless feel that the possibility of a thorough explanation lay somewhere within the comprehensive world of its realism. The subject of every canvas by ...”

“... an actor explore a part and bring greater depth and resonance to it. Trimble and his deputy, John Taylor, are redefining Unionism, and the redefinition is there in the News Letter editorial’s ‘new-sprung modern light’, as Edmund Burke would put it. Something is flying off and out of the caked nest, and it’s not crying ‘yarr yarr yarr’. The ...”

“... Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For ...”

“... in August 1987 after Douglas Hurd, then Home Secretary, asked Jim Sharples, then Deputy Chief Constable of the Avon and Somerset Force, to investigate new alibi evidence submitted on behalf of Paul Hill. Two years later, as a result of the inquiry into that evidence. Hurd referred the case to the Court of Appeal. It was only then that detectives from the ...”

“... This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes ...”

“... John Clearwater, the tormented mathematician in William Boyd’s novel Brazzaville Beach, wants to reduce chaos, flux and turbulence to an elegant set of equations. He’s also an obsessive moviegoer who refuses to watch anything which doesn’t meet his one absolute criterion: ‘he believed, with a fundamental zeal, that a true film, a film that was true to the nature of its own form, had to have a happy ending ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... as the heirs of Moore, Piper, Sutherland, Nicholson and Hepworth, let alone of Reynolds, Constable or Turner? And yet we wonder why our national tradition appears so enervated.’ Reynolds, Constable and Turner were all passionately patriotic and the first two were capable of the most crass disparagement of foreign ...”

“... of fortune flourished,’ says the cover flap of Frances Stonor Saunders’s biography of Sir John Hawkwood (c.1320-94), one-time leader of the White Company made famous by Conan Doyle’s historical novels. The 14th century was indeed an age of opportunity for military adventurers, and for mercenary soldiers in particular. Independent companies, led by ...”