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“... Patrick Cosgrave presents us in this short book with a remarkable analysis of why Mr Butler was never chosen to be prime minister. When I think of Rab Butler, I recall Addison’s words: ‘’Tis not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.’ He undoubtedly had one of the best brains in post-war government – but he was never popular ...”

“... Patrick Cosgrave is a well-known political journalist who has been within and without the Conservative Party for many years. He has played Boswell to Margaret Thatcher’s Johnson, having come in from the cold, as it were, of the Heath years. He has now written a book about Peter Carrington, who resigned, of course, as Foreign Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982 ...”

“... of the protean nature of Powell’s gifts of intellect as well as the odd shape of his career that Patrick Cosgrave decided to write of his subject’s ‘Lives’. This is a mistake, since Powell’s life has been very much of a piece. The failure, in the conventional sense, of his political career arose from the same personal traits and gifts as the ...”

“... In the dismal mid-Seventies Patrick Cosgrave, later to be Margaret Thatcher’s adviser and biographer, took me to a Friday luncheon at the old Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street. Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts ...”

“... part of what was going on everywhere. A whole society was turning away from itself. Once the Liam Cosgrave Government came to power in 1973, the Irish middle class, new and old, had, in the cabinet, voices of reason, such as Conor Cruise O’Brien and Garret FitzGerald, to lead them away from a notion of their Irish heritage as something dark, catastrophic ...”

“... as President of the Dáil Government, Collins, was killed in an ambush ten days later. W.T. Cosgrave then succeeded to the leadership. The Civil War ended in May 1923 with the defeat of the Republicans. Three years later de Valera split from the Republicans and formed his own party, Fianna Fail, which entered the Dáil in 1927 and was elected to ...”