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“... champagne and brandy . . . to incapacitate any lesser man’, as his private secretary John Colville put it. He would talk to ministers with Toby, his budgie, alighting (and sometimes doing more than that) on their heads. He had frequent sleeps. His method of dealing with crises, he explained, was to ‘turn out the light, say “bugger ...”

“... fair book, but I cannot believe that its subject would have liked it any better than he cared for John Campbell’s 1993 biography, Heath’s own copy of which is scrawled with angry marginalia – ‘Nonsense!’, ‘No!’ and ‘Wrong!’ Campbell’s book was less alluring in style, more detailed in its accounts of interminable ...”

“... Fuller’s declaration that Europe and America have much to learn from us was published in the Salisbury Review in 1987 and then republished in Seeing through Berger, the extended version of Seeing Berger, in which he describes how he ceased to be a Marxist disciple of Berger’s and was converted to Civilisation by Berger’s bête noire, Lord ...”

“... heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John Gardner’s novel, is a scion of the landed gentry and works in the mysterious upper reaches of the Foreign Office. There he recruits his offspring and nephews and nieces into the ranks of the secret service, just in time for the First World War. But all ...”

“... in Uganda. I was pleased when the widely circulated, anti-colonial Central African Examiner in Salisbury, Rhodesia, published a poem of mine and then some of my dispatches, written under a nom de plume, describing the political upheaval in Malawi. I had also been writing fiction, but it wasn’t until a few years later that I finished a novel. I was then a ...”

“... Fifty years, almost to the month, before the publication of John Adamson’s book, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated his intention to write what he knew would be ‘a very long book’, the most ambitious of his career, on the Puritan revolution of 17th-century England. The project went through many mutations over the next four years, but by 1961 it was virtually complete ...”

“... to the separation of Ireland from Britain. The Tory Government of Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, and its Irish administration under his nephew Chief Secretary A.J. Balfour – whose preferment had given rise to the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ – had thrown everything, including its Law Officers, and the resources of the Secret Service ...”

“... unusual: they had been transported to Barbados as suspected Royalist insurgents after the failed Salisbury Uprising of 1655. But, in the mid-17th century, white people could be found near the bottom of the slave hierarchy as well as at its apex. As the plantations in the Caribbean and the American South were established, white labourers performed many of the ...”

“... abroad. The nullification of the Poles culminated in the execution of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, a septuagenarian who had to be carried to the scaffold in a chair. Greg Walker calls this ‘the nadir of royal vindictiveness’. Vindictiveness it was. Bernard finds no evidence here for a political and military conspiracy against Henry. As Walker ...”

“... Western liturgy popular in the English Church, which took its cue from practices devised for Salisbury Cathedral in previous centuries – the Sarum Use. Various initiatives in Henry’s lifetime produced nothing more than a vernacular processional rite (a litany) pestering God to back the king in his last major war against the French, but matters ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining ...”

“... too dangerous to proceed, and shelves it. Instead, he agrees to a catastrophic deal, brokered by John Prescott, which commits him to handing over to Brown before the end of his second term, on the condition that Brown gives him his full support in the interim. As even Blair acknowledges, this was a terrible mistake. The agreement made no sense, because its ...”

“... policy in Germany, Russia and the United States. In 1902, Balfour succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as Prime Minister and introduced the Aliens Bill, the first piece of modern immigration legislation, in order to prevent East European Jews from finding refuge in Britain. (Echoes of Balfour’s resistance to the Eastern hordes persist in Jack ...”

“... be equally true of its paraphrasable content.’ Taking issue with a recent editor of the Sonnets, John Kerrigan, she points to his lack of interest in the linguistic variation in sonnet 129, and says he takes ‘a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon’. For Vendler, the verbal imagination’s true intent is ...”

“... Thatcherite views, an admiration for Norman Tebbit and Roger Scruton, and a subscription to the Salisbury Review. The moment of truth arrived in 1964 when Wilson became prime minister and attempted to impose his own appointee as head of MI5. The service resisted and Wilson backed off. Indeed, to prove his good will Wilson even acquiesced in the continuing ...”