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“... the young Wedgwood Benn was elected in a by-election for Bristol South-East to succeed the ailing Stafford Cripps. Up to this point the story is told in family correspondence, from which a complicated but largely sympathetic figure emerges. As the ‘baby of the House’ – he was 25 – Benn decided to ‘try out a political diary’. The candour does not ...”

“... Revisited all played their part. But no step was more important than the appointment in 1936 of James Lees-Milne as secretary of the National Trust’s Country Houses Committee. The story of how this Baroque-loving, Etonian aesthete travelled the length and breadth of the country, persuading indigent owners to hand over their properties to the Trust in ...”

“... second Duke of Sutherland in 1835, and hung for more than a century in the magnificent gallery of Stafford House (now Lancaster House). Architectural recesses were specially designed for them, crowned by medallion portraits of the artist, and they were surrounded by a court of smaller Spanish paintings. The apotheosis of Murillo in London and Paris called ...”

“... Cavendish Square, north of Oxford Street, but still retained a mansion of 50 rooms in St James’s Square, along with other properties. As a man of commerce he invested in everything from coal to oysters, from soap to slaving, none of which commended him to Old Money. The dukes of Richmond, descended from a royal mistress, notoriously reaped a ...”

“... the balance of payments came under pressure from a recession in America. As the ailing chancellor, Stafford Cripps, convalesced in a Swiss clinic, the key decisions fell to Wilson and two inexperienced colleagues, Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay. He responded to their calm assurance with a calculating vacillation that laid the basis for a lasting distrust, even ...”

“... on Standards and Privileges. He has written an account of Christian Socialism, biographies of Stafford Cripps and – strange conjunction – Glenda Jackson, a two-volume ‘biography’ of Parliament, a critique of the British aristocracy, a history of ten gay MPs who opposed appeasement and, only last year, a book called Code of Conduct: Why We Need to ...”

“... problem, in the Section’s eyes, was unemployment. The younger economists in the Section, notably James Meade, developed the approach outlined by Keynes in the General Theory published in 1936. Robbins himself had initially rejected Keynes in favour of the ‘classical’ position, but was in process of being converted and was content to leave the younger ...”

“... of them. I even have to will myself to watch modern film or TV adaptations of Dickens, Trollope or James, and when it comes to Jane Austen adaptations, I refuse. This is not because I’m an anti-television snob. I watch TV and box sets of popular drama series in greedy excess. Westerns, thrillers, political, medical, legal and science fiction are welcome even ...”

“... of violence by lying in wait, with 26 others, to murder Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham and Earl of Stafford, in 1450. The ambush failed, so Malory cannot be given too much blame (or credit) for that. But in a very short period this Warwickshire Sir Thomas found himself accused of a string of other crimes, including doing barely credible damage to the Duke of ...”

“... causes. It is powerfully polemical, tough-minded and categorical in its judgments. For example, James Griffiths and Aneurin Bevan’s commitment to building a welfare state is reduced to the fact that they were ‘both of them products, although individually very different, of Victorian romantic idealism as transmitted down the generations by the ...”

“... which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the vault of an outside privy. That’s the sort of court-room occasion the Victorians loved. Newspaper agitation for the commuting of death ...”

“... should be bad: he despised the very notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather ...”

“... to get to sleep at night. He was now travelling regularly to New York to see his psychiatrist, James Shea, in an attempt to stave off his depression. Whether Shea helped him is questionable; what is certain is that Berryman emerged newly fascinated with psychiatry and his own buried psychological issues, especially the suicide of his father just before his ...”

“... as much as it does the world of Capote. And that is one of the book’s strengths: Plimpton, like James Boswell, is an enthusiast for the world he is conjuring; he knows it well, knows all the figures in the carpet; the people are for the most part his acquaintances too, and his way of arranging their words is bent by his own understanding of how it all ...”

“... three major plays and one operetta he wrote before his 29th birthday. In 1780 he became an MP for Stafford and, aside from a couple of short periods of government office, remained a leading member of the Whig opposition (and in particular, a harrier of Pitt the Younger) throughout what was a long political career. His most noted campaign was against Warren ...”