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“... Bristol in the hands of the mob for three days, the Mansion House and three prisons sacked, rioters killed in Derby, Nottingham Castle burned to the ground – that was the news from England in the summer of 1832. We should not be beguiled by the calm portraits of Sir Robert Peel or his heavy, measured prose. He led his party through times much more violent than our own ...”

“... quite a lot about the time-servers – quite a lot, if he wants to air it, on Richard Holbrooke, Douglas Hurd, David Owen. On the UN, which is less a matter of dishing dirt than asking very basic questions, he is in a trickier position. In March 1999, Nato was in breach of international law and until quite recently, Milosevic was a stickler for ...”

“... One of the first traditionalists to complain when Home Secretary Douglas Hurd referred the case of the Guildford Four to the Court of Appeal was Ivor Stanbrook, Tory MP for Orpington. Mr Stanbrook was worried about the effect on British justice of all this questioning of verdicts in celebrated criminal cases ...”

“... in the most unlikely places, but in an extraordinarily confused and baffling way. On the right, Douglas Hurd and other ministers have extolled the ‘active citizen’ – by implication, at any rate, a comfortable suburbanite impelled to good works by his or her own public spirit. At the centre and on the centre-left, a disparate band including Paddy ...”

“... a former Captain of the School, and, I suspect, the next leader of the Conservative Party: Douglas Hurd, who writes: ‘Eton is a beautiful place full of eccentric characters doing odd things; so it is a natural target for an affectionate photographer. The latest to aim at the target is Mark Dixon, who as an Etonian was sufficiently relaxed to ...”

“... that the English, by virtue of their religion, literature and laws, were as Jewish as he was. Douglas Hurd and Edward Young’s Disraeli: or, the Two Lives, and Robert O’Kell’s Disraeli: The Romance of Politics diverge when they come to Disraeli’s Byronism. Hurd and Young wave it aside: ‘Disraeli aspired to ...”

“... of a two-speed Europe, in which Britain would be consigned to the slow lane. John Major and Douglas Hurd believe Britain will be in control of the 1996 agenda, and dismiss the possibility that others any longer wish to move faster towards integration than they do. Therefore, they contend, the old model of fast and slow tracks is out of ...”

“... ministers ‘grappled with the tedious but mildly pressing problems of the Irish electorate’. Douglas Hurd may not yet be bored, but he would have difficulty in bettering the description of the problems he is facing. So few of them have changed, or have been solved. Part of the difficulty, indeed, is that the nature of the original solution was that ...”

“... miserable, is on his knees. Among the bull’s-eyes are Robin Day, Ian Paisley, David Owen, Douglas Hurd, Kenneth Baker, David Mellor, Alan Bennett. There are a few outers: Jonathan Miller, Stephen Spender, Alfred Brendel, Melvyn Bragg – but even in these he is good on the hair, which, according to Craig Brown, was what he always homed in ...”

“... Major’s decline rather than his fall. At the time of the Conservative Party Conference, Douglas Hurd warned his party to take heed of the terrible historical precedents of 1846 and 1903 – the two great splits in the Party’s history. From a Conservative point of view this was a pertinent message to deliver, the right thing to say to his ...”

“... Four. The only politician respected by the former Lord Chief Justice Lord Lane, we are told, was Douglas Hurd. But was not Hurd openly attacked by the same Lord Lane in his monstrous judgment at the first appeal of the Birmingham Six, which he dismissed? In the cosy, cautious style of a BBC correspondent (one of ...”

“... and assorted do-gooders and bleeding-hearts. Judicial horsehair sometimes visibly bristles at it. Douglas Hurd, for his part, is thought to be equally angered by the snubs his references have been encountering. It is always the duty of a prosecutor who no longer believes that a conviction can decently be sustained to tell the appellate court so, and this ...”

“... for example, is never properly identified. Is it the Home Office, the Prison Department, Douglas Hurd, Chris Train (Director General of the Prison Service) or individual institutional governors who are being referred to? Some measure of how complex and how important careful identification can be is perhaps gained from the directive issued by the ...”

“... unlawful funding of the Pergau Dam in Malaysia, involved not him but Lady Thatcher and the saintly Douglas Hurd. It is also said that Michael Howard has demeaned his high office by using legislation to embarrass the Opposition. Much is made in this regard of such monstrosities as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill and the new anti-terrorism ...”

“... supplied me with a secret memorandum sent to his colleagues by a director of the bank, David Douglas-Home: ‘As you are all aware,’ Douglas-Home wrote, Andrew MacKay MP advises us on our political strategy and it is no small credit to him that we have recovered our political acceptability in Westminster and ...”