Richard Bartholomew

a seventeenth-century treason trial was not an attempt to ascertain the truth or administer justice, except in a punitive sense. It was a morality play, staged as a demonstration of government power, an affirmation of kingly authority, and a warning to the unwary.

The entire town came to gape at a décor of such splendour that an admiring critic was reduced to describing it as a compromise between Russia and Spain. There was an enormous entrance hall, overlooked by a balcony with carved stone balustrades; there were Moorish arches and a feeling of 'infinity beyond'.

At the end of April 1945 the allies entered Buchenwald. Next day, towards the end of the afternoon, they reached Belsen. The following morning, on 22 April, Sidney came to the concentration camp. He stayed all day. That night he visited the nearest journalists' camp and persuaded an old friend, Alan Moorehead, of the Express, to go in and write about what he had seen. Then he drank an entire bottle of whisky; it had, friends remembered later, no effect on him at all.

Sidney… didn't really believe in impartiality. By letter and by meeting they fought, backwards and forwards, advancing one step, retreating the next. They fought about drunken driving, they fought about the monarchy, suicide and hire purchase. They fought, passionately, about 'What the Papers Say'. Jeremy Isaacs remembers Sir Robert Fraser coming to Granada and telling the assembled 'Searchlight' team that every single episode of the series had been a direct infringement of the Television Act in that it had expressed a single point of view. And when 'Searchlight' came to an end and 'World in Action' was born they fought about a naval prison in which a young man hanged himself (the programme was cancelled)…

It is not possible to foresee or foretell from what classes or conditions of life the future wielders of power in this country will be drawn. Some may be as in the past men of wealth and famous descent; some may belong to the world of trade and business; others may spring from the ranks of the manual toilers. To none of these in the midst of their strenuous and responsible labours could the spirit and anodyne of Chequers do anything but good. In the city-bred man especially, the periodic contact with the most typical rural life would create and preserve a just sense of proportion between the claims of town and country. To the revolutionary statesman the antiquity and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history and exercise a check upon too hasty upheavals, whilst even the most reactionary could scarcely be insensible to the spirit of human freedom which permeates the countryside of Hampden, Burke and Milton.

The most treasured is an exquisitely illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript Missal from Bressanone in the Tyrol, immaculately preserved in its original velvet binding with gilt bosses and clasps. The other is a first edition of Albertus Magnus’ Paradise Animae, printed in, Cologne in 1483, seven years before Caxton first brought printing to England. There is a first printed edition (1503) of all but four of Euripides’ tragedies, added to the library by Sir George Russell, as well as sixteenth-century first editions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Thermophoriazusae and a translation by Erasmus of Lucian of Samosata’s Saturnalia (published in Cologne), with the arms of Louis XIII on the binding. In a first illustrated edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1688) are Sergeant Thurbarne’s annotations; and a sixteenth-century volume of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has Sir Robert Croke’s name inscribed on the fly-leaf.

Standing on the empty quay of Odessa Wharf, letting his imagination freewheel while Parry conjured offices and apartment blocks, conference centres and marinas from the cold London clay beneath their feet, Perry felt an old familiar stirring deep in his soul. It was greed. Why not buy into the Docklands Dream, then going dirt-cheap at £35 a square foot? Why not make a huge profit; accumulate shedloads of cash; double or even quadruple the money he was meant to be holding in trust for his friends in jail?... A phoenix London Docklands was rising, and a fat chunk of it was stretching skyward on the proceeds of the stolen Brink’s-Mat gold. In Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There is no such thing as society’ Britain, this was and remains beyond irony.

From this moment on, Cable would have to live out her days in the bleak and soulless desert of the witness protection programme... Over the next few days and weeks, Cable changed her identity, her appearance, her habits, the way she dressed, her hobbies, her reading matter, and just about everything else. Allowed very little contact with her immediate family, and none with her former friends, even her authorized telephone calls were kept to the barest minimum.

Dorothea de Périgord was as well equipped for the work as Princess Talleyrand would have been incompetent. In intelligence she was not put to shame by any of the statesmen who were to surround her; in beauty she could stand comparison with any other flower of the European aristocracy ; by birth she was entitled to a place of honour in even the most exclusive drawing-rooms of Vienna. All she lacked was the sophistication that comes from experience and an exhaustive training in high society and even this was to prove an advantage; after an evening of hard-boiled brilliance with Princess Bagration or Countess Zichy it was a relief to turn to the innocence and comparative simplicity of this girl of just twenty-one.

…The royal house of Prussia were her childhood friends, the Emperor of Russia an old ally of her mother's. Her three sisters were all at Vienna and strategically placed for the provision of information: Wilhelmina, Duchess of Sagan, was jostling for the position of mistress to Prince Metternich; Pauline, Princess of Hohenzollern-Hechingen had a husband among the ruling princes and a lover among the leading negotiators and Jeanne, Duchess of Acerenza was formally mistress of a Dutchman but still found time for a spirited flirtation with Frederick Gentz, Secretary General to the Congress and an infallible source of well-informed gossip.

was the last fling of the cosmopolitan aristocracy before it succumbed to the bourgeois prejudices of nationalism. When the host himself was an Austrian Emperor, Italian by birth and speaking French by preference, how could the guests be conscious of their races? National aims were one thing but personal nationalities quite another; the Russians set a good example by having in their delegation three Germans, one Pole, one Greek, one Frenchman . . . and one Russian.

There were many wild stories abroad, according to one of which Piscatory was supposed to have fathered a child whom, it was alleged, Dorothea had cunningly contrived to bear without being detected and to dispose of with equal dexterity and mystery'.

Des enfants naissent de ces amours, toujours très discrètement : le 23 janvier 1826, à Hyères, une petite Julie-Zulmé dont on ne sait pas très bien qui en est le père, le 10 septembre 1827, à Bordeaux, une autre Antonine-Pélagie qui est cette fois probablement de Piscatory. Dorothée ne les reconnaît pas plus qu'elle n'avait reconnu Marie-Henriette Dessalles, née de sa passion pour [Count Clam-Martinitz].