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“... about the capacity of fiction to report on the world is still very fashionable, and in that sense Norman Gash’s book on Robert Surtees goes against the grain of present-day literary analysis. It does not go against the traditional grain of writing about Surtees, a novelist who has almost always been praised simply as a reporter of the English scene in ...”

“... A new publication by Norman Gash is cause for excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s writings have little in common except an elegantly plain and direct prose, Clio herself would find it difficult to award the palm to one or the other ...”

“... as notably second-rate. There is, however, another reason for his dim reputation. As Professor Gash points out at the end of this scholarly and most interesting biography, Liverpool ‘was a great conservative statesman; but it was before the rise of the Conservative Party and there is no niche for him in the party pantheon.’ No doubt this is a part of ...”

“... monarchy is surely shown by the actions of his brother. ‘In his short reign of seven years,’ Norman Gash once wrote, William IV ‘thrice dismissed a Ministry; twice dissolved Parliament for political purposes before its time; three times made formal proposals to his ministers for a coalition with their political opponents; and on one celebrated ...”

“... is ‘nonsense’; to Stewart, ‘whether the offer was made is a matter of doubt.’ Yet Norman Gash in his 1984 study of the then prime minister Lord Liverpool takes the matter seriously enough, and what no one questions is that Brougham was fully capable of such tergiversation. Was there, on this as on other such occasions, some ...”

“... education coupled with a talent for business rather than a high station in landed society’, and Norman Gash has pointed out that ‘it would be nearer the truth to regard Liverpool’s Cabinet as a set of industrious middle-class administrators with a high, almost evangelical, sense of duty rather than as a group of careless, hardbitten ...”

“... thunder. More than once, however, I’ve seen writers ride bicycles on the high-wire, eat fire, gash themselves open to call attention to their books. They end up with little more than a scorched nose, a broken bone.’ But he was unable somehow to thumb his own scorched nose, or even vaguely laugh at the culture he eviscerated in his fiction, and his ...”

“... His childhood was rural but eventful. Encounters with livestock left him broken-nosed, with a gash from a bull’s horn across his lips; smallpox left him scarred; he was tall, and grew burly if not obese. His ugliness was not of the craggy kind: ‘His bulbous cheeks,’ Lawday says, ‘gave him the look of an enormous cherub.’ To his political ...”

“... were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for ...”

“... he pushed her out of a moving car? – seemed almost unassimilable with the figure. You expect Norman Mailer to stab someone. You don’t expect the author of ‘This Is Water’ to stalk someone for years. He often made light of his obsessions in interviews: Alanis Morissette. Melanie Griffith. Margaret Thatcher, leaning forward to cover his hand. These ...”