“... tell, they were seriously funny and devoid of serious meaning. There was no more Wodehouse at home; my father took a dim view of frivolous books. But my local library took a dim view of the contemporary unless it was slightly unfashionable or too popular to ignore – and the shortage of more recent fiction left room for two whole shelves of Wodehouse. I ...”

“... as to maximise its literary importance. All Southam’s principal deductions are supported by Lord David Cecil, in a foreword written with that critic’s customary charm, his inimitable blend of middlebrow thoughts in upper-class tones. Though he cavils gently at Jane Austen’s taste for Grandison (‘I cannot help sympathising a little with Miss ...”

“... sepoys, a string of greyhounds, a yacht and a stud of pedigree Arabs. He sought to make himself lord of Arabia by an alliance with the Wahhabi, which instantly flopped. Undaunted, he turned north to try his luck with ‘our Koordistan’, admiring the purity of their mountain lifestyle. The romanticising of the Kurds became less popular with the British ...”

“... enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone as a scholar. Lord Mansfield, as Murray became, spanned the 18th century in more than simply years, though living from 1705 to 1793 was a good start. As chief justice of the King’s Bench for 32 years, he modernised an antiquated system of common law and rationalised a ...”

“... other manufacturers in forming a nationwide League against the Corn Laws which kept the price of home-produced grain artificially high by restricting imports. In 1846, the laws were finally repealed by Sir Robert Peel. The entrenched political, social and economic power of those who owned land had, it appeared, succumbed before the enterprise and exertions ...”

“... talent for a dreamy sort of introspection: ‘You all sit and talk about each other’s souls,’ Lord Charles Beresford said. Their children, buoyant on champagne and self-belief, were the first to turn against them. ‘Their minds are almshouses [for] outworn notions and wrinkled phrases,’ Raymond Asquith, Margot’s stepson, sneered. ‘We do not hunt ...”

“... the organisation he was applauding. A subtler Tory response came from the former Foreign Secretary Lord Howe, who suggested that the case was further evidence of the need immediately to make the European Convention on Human Rights part of UK domestic law, so that its terms could in future be applied by British judges sitting in ordinary cases in ...”

“... but then how are my wife and I to stagger along with suitcases? I suppose the answer is to stay at home. Devon and Cornwall were almost unknown country to me, which is slightly shame-making. Plymouth has an attractive position and a character all its own, provided by centuries of the Navy, which still dominates Plymouth though it has now few ships. Dominant ...”

“... acted as chief correspondent for the Times in South Africa. There he fell under the influence of Lord Milner, a great proconsul with the flair of the dangerous don for gathering around him a group of young men and converting them into disciples. Amery was the young intellectual with a First in Greats and a Fellowship at All Souls. Milner was the idol of the ...”

“... in order to produce chapters and chapters of brain-numbing information.He did talk to some people. Lord Snowdon, for example, and Princess Margaret’s former private secretary, Lord Napier and Ettrick (who apparently is just the single person), as well as a couple of former ladies-in-waiting. There were also those who chose ...”

“... gallery, indeed, that inspired Macaulay to write of a Fourth Estate. Stead’s contemporary Lord Esher said that as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette Stead ‘came nearer to ruling the British Empire than any living man’. He seemed to be instrumental in every headline-grabbing event of the turbulent 1880s: the sending of the heroic but ungovernable ...”

“... Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase. A word, too, should be said for his life of his father, Lord Carnock, which he regarded as his best achievement. He wrote with care and in an elegant, limpid style: but there are times when one is reminded of Balfour’s remark about Asquith, whose clarity of speech, he observed, was a positive disadvantage when he ...”

“... earner’ when chartered to Arabs? A picture with a cosier domestic appeal shows the one-time home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Headington Hill Hall, near Oxford, now the ‘council house’ seat of Robert Maxwell, lit up by rockets at night, with a huge illuminated sign saying ‘Happy Birthday Bob’ suspended from a tall tree. Perhaps because the picture ...”

“... just after the First World War, but the peak of imperial visibility and imperialist sentiment at home was arguably reached two or three decades earlier, most colourfully in the great imperial pageant that marked the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897. The thumping Unionist electoral triumph of 1895 was confidently ascribed by Sir Robert Ensor (who had ...”

“... he didn’t commit. This time there was an unlikely political hero in the form of the elderly Lord Chuter Ede. As home secretary in the Attlee government he had approved the execution, and thus, as Evans says, had less to gain than anyone alive from reopening the case, but he was driven by conscience to help do so. By ...”