“... biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a tragic irony of events Sir John, who was younger than Eden, predeceased him. Various possibilities have been canvassed since Eden’s death. The choice for the ‘authorised’ biography is said, though I have never seen any public ...”

“... while the inexhaustible Russian masses pressed in on her most valued possession, India. ‘Now,’ Lord Salisbury said in 1898, ‘with the whole earth occupied and the movements of expansion continuing, she will have to fight to the death against successive rivals.’ Fighting to the death can’t have seemed a very attractive option, if you believed what ...”

“... in the midst of the People’s War. To Colville, the small world of the pre-war ruling circle was home, and he wrote in his diaries as though its continued existence could be taken for granted. Of aristocratic descent on both sides of the family, he inherited the Court connections of his mother, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. At the age of 12 he was a Page ...”

“... be unwise to protest. And one must remember that our judges are, by definition, rich men. A Law Lord earns £71,400 a year; our senior judges are recruited from the comfortable upper-middle classes and from amongst barristers earning hundreds of thousands a year. The latest antics of the Law Lords have deservedly created a storm. But no one who has studied ...”

“... in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust.’ Ten years later, Johnson was sacked for fondling one pupil too many and changed his name to Cory. After his ...”

“... Birkenhead to complement it with a one-volume Life. While Martin Gilbert and his team were at work Lord Birkenhead was to be the only other person given access to the Chartwell Papers: his book was not to be published until the last of Gilbert’s volumes had appeared. Biographical work projected on such a scale is unlikely to be completed quite as ...”

“... the advance of the SNP. He set in train a Royal Commission on the Constitution, chaired first by Lord Crowther and then, after his death, by the Scottish judge Lord Kilbrandon, which came out in favour of a devolved Scottish assembly. In 1973, the year Kilbrandon reported, another major tremor ran through Scottish Labour ...”

“... by tireless propagation of his legend among Tory magnates and society hostesses on his annual home leaves, in having himself appointed second-in-command to Roberts in South Africa, Commander-in-Chief under Curzon in India (until their famous quarrel resulted in Curzon’s resignation) and the Governor-General of Egypt – from which stepping-stone he ...”

“... no body of administrative law, Dicey’s doctrine of parliamentary supremacism stood firm until Home Rule came up: then he changed his mind and argued that there were some things that even Parliament couldn’t do. This apart, Dicey’s was a classic endeavour to enshrine what happened (or what he claimed happened) as what ought always to happen, and ...”

“... March last year titled Do We Need a Constitutional Convention for the UK? The Liberal Democrats’ Home Rule and Community Rule Commission has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union. A similar call has come from David Melding, the Conservative deputy presiding officer of the Welsh Assembly, in The ...”

“... takeover of the Times in 1908 sent the same message as the peerages bestowed on Alfred in 1905 (Lord Northcliffe) and Harold in 1914 (Lord Rothermere). The message was that the Harmsworths had made it. Northcliffe’s struggle with the crusty management at the Times was the stuff of comedy, though not for the protagonists ...”

“... but to declare the evacuation permanent. Mr Ralph Bond, who had formed and commanded the Tyneham Home Guard among his own villagers in 1940, was bought out. Those of his villagers who hadn’t died of shock were rehoused, many of them in Tyneham Close, a specially-built council estate near Wareham. Tyneham disappeared behind the wire: Elizabethan ...”

“... even Gerald Ronson will have found. Any hopes of an honour or title will have crumbled.’ Even Lord Lane could be forgiven for thinking it pretty rich to be called a dinosaur by the judge who jailed Michelle Renshaw for being too scared to give evidence and who sent Tracey Scott to prison for six months with her baby for letting her friends take goods ...”

“... with a government embarrassed in its foreign relations by a controversial programme. Think of poor Lord Carrington mending fences with Saudi Arabia after Death of a Princess. The programme undoubtedly caused offence, yet it was worth making, and with all its faults it did something to broaden our understanding of Saudi Arabian ways. Diplomats understand that ...”

“... further from society as a whole. It is an appeal to the baser sentiments of Middle England by a Home Secretary who does not accept the need to preserve a balance between the powers of the state and the rights of defendants. It signals that those accused of crime do not deserve our protection. The Bill is 374 pages long and its stated aim is ‘the ...”