“... that ordinarily quite lively writers are not at their most sparky when working for the DNB: Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Shiva Naipaul, for instance, or Richard Ingrams on Claud Cockburn (although Ingrams has taken the trouble, it seems, to check through the Times’s files in search of that famous Cockburn headline: ‘Small Earthquake in Chile. Not ...”

“... and his successor, Charles Moore, though one with a strong ideological slant which may – as Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently argued – have damaged the Tories by losing the historic thread of fuzzy, inclusive One Nation Conservatism. It certainly did a brilliant job of backing the wrong candidate in the Tory Party’s many leadership contests, in ...”

“... end of 1989 Lawson was gone, and within a year Thatcher had followed him, toppled by her deputy, Geoffrey Howe, on account of her growing hostility to the Community. She was still strong enough to ensure that her favoured successor, John Major, took over, but it soon became clear that he had no more intention than Lawson or Howe of hewing to her vision of ...”