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“... smaller and even less well resourced: in 2020, before the Troubles Legacy Act was passed, Chief Constable Simon Byrne claimed it would take twenty years to get through its outstanding caseload. Legacy inquests have dragged on for years, too, in part because government departments have been slow to disclose information requested by the courts.In 2015, with ...”

“... freely as terms of approval and abuse (often in relation to Britain and Hollywood respectively). John Caughie contributes a sharp set of notes on broadcasting and the cinema, among other things tracing the influence of Scottish Presbyterianism on Grierson and Reith. Barr, in another essay in the same vein, points out how radio was seen as socially cohesive ...”

“... Essex, a place with a long history of boat-building and Dionysiac boho revels: Francis Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English ...”

“... he was posted to the Intelligence Corps. Before his posting we were visited by the local police constable and his wife, accompanied by two Special Branch officers who searched the house for incriminating papers. The wife joined us for breakfast, to make sure we didn’t try to hide anything. It was evident that she was embarrassed, and all the more so when ...”

“... a fictional symposium that ran in the paper between 1822 and 1835. The author of the Noctes was John Wilson, who constructed dialogues between his own alter ego (‘Christopher North’) and that of Hogg (‘the Shepherd’). The Shepherd gets the best lines – better, some have suggested, than anything Hogg ever wrote – but he is also made to look a ...”

“... War, because strong language – like strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used ...”

“... offered her sweets.One​ of the first people I met when I went back to the North-East was retired constable Joe Bradley, who looked after Heron in the gaps between police interviews. Bradley has thought a great deal about what happened in 1992, but talking to him made me realise how belief in a suspect’s guilt can permeate an entire force. Officers who ...”

“... at their job’, had reached their position only because they were Masons. In London, a Chief Constable testified that ‘Masonry still has some controlling influence,’ while a Detective Sergeant admitted that ‘I’ve seen Masonry used for rotten things in the Force in recent years.’ Knight devotes a chapter to Operation Countryman, the biggest ...”

“... may suggest, the level of sheer verbal force and arresting cadence is abnormally high. His friend John Sterling registered these characteristics when he thanked him for two recent letters ‘which, unlike other people’s, have the writer’s signature in every word as well as at the end’. The project to collect, edit and publish all known letters by ...”

“... some of the women believed it must be a power thing. A few knew him as Peter, others as Craig or John. One woman had him in her phone as Blue Van Man. Shown ranks of photographs by detectives, however, the women all pointed to the same man. His name was Iain Packer. He knew Emma, they told the police. He’d had sex with her regularly, at least once by ...”

“... but as home secretary he came into his own.One of Sidmouth’s spies, a man called John Castle, was on the action committee responsible for organising the huge and supposedly peaceful meeting of reformers on Spa Fields that was to be addressed by the mellifluous Orator Hunt. Castle tirelessly whipped up the labourers who had just been laid off ...”

“... with a naturalistic account of sex and sexual pleasure that there was in France. The radical John Wilkes’s venture into sexual literature is so marginal that it doesn’t figure here at all; the conflation of liberty and libertinage in Don Giovanni’s famous aria would have fallen on uncomprehending ears. We do not quite know, as Porter and Hall point ...”

“... in the grip of several stout bobbies, her skirt round her waist while one especially beefy constable administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite ...”

“... the king’s presumed supremacy of the Church, his divorce and the Boleyn marriage. Thomas More, John Fisher and the Carthusian monks whom Henry had executed were now cast as religious martyrs. Henry himself, worse than Nero, was guilty of incest and adultery, and heading straight to hell. Pole’s manuscript was suffused with a sense of his own aristocratic ...”

“... of the humiliation of some over-mighty cabinet colleague – Geoffrey Howe, say, or Jim Prior or John Moore or Francis Pym – I could picture the scene only too well:I can do no better at this stage than describe my own punishment chamber, which I call the Lady Chapel.   This is not blasphemy on my part. It is a chapel to the Lady (the Lady I serve) in ...”