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“... be dismembered by the Nazis. The king was obliged to accept his advisers’ warning not to welcome Neville Chamberlain when he arrived at the airport brandishing the worthless piece of paper that he claimed guaranteed ‘peace for our time’, but he still appeared with him on the palace balcony. The full truth about these matters won’t be known until the ...”

“... drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired John Wilkes, whose radicalism took a far more activist form. It was – presumably – in discussions and arguments with men such as these that ...”

“... Great to Winston Churchill, or to put it in somewhat less heroic terms, Ethelred the Unready to Neville Chamberlain (we didn’t bother in those days with the Welsh or the Scots). But in practice, if we were going to learn how to do any thinking of our own, we had time only to study discrete and often unrelated topics: the rise of the gentry and their role ...”

“... being the Lancastrian royal family, the fourth being Edward’s cousin and rival Sir Humphrey Neville, and the fifth being Malory – a man, one has to say, who made the (dis)Honours List by (de)merit alone, without assistance from birth. However, these events – variously explained or apologised for by biographers – have caused less difficulty for the ...”

“... Priorities were ultimately determined by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who happened to be Neville Chamberlain. The lion’s share went to the RAF to ‘deter’ Hitler, enough for the Navy to show the flag at Singapore, and the Army was confined to Home and Imperial Defence. The priorities were rational enough, but unworkable. History was to be ...”

“... true celebrity ‘delivers’. He or she keeps weaving and moving in an effort not to disappoint. Richard Nixon was such a one. Every time a new segment of Watergate tape was released, revealing his Jew-baiting or thuggery or corruption, he would publish a new book on grand strategy or at least fly to Beijing. What a trouper! Such a pro! Say what you like ...”

“... and the French sandwich of Arletty and Yvonne Arnaud contains Anthony Armstrong-Jones. The name of Neville Chamberlain seems to set off a nervous chain-reaction of theatricality, for he is noisily succeeded by Gower Champion, Coco Chanel, Carol Channing, ‘Chips’ Channon (by no means out of place), and Charlie Chaplin. All the Coopers are there: Lady ...”

“... thinking that he should remain in the army. His party disagreed, and he was summoned to see Neville Chamberlain in Downing Street. He agreed to stand on condition that he could fight the election in uniform and could return to his regiment even if he won. The prime minister readily agreed. As there was a wartime electoral truce between the main ...”

“... it almost wrecked the Labour Party and established the extraordinary hegemony of Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and the Conservative Party – but it was a balance-of-payments crisis that was resolved the moment Britain went off the gold standard and devalued the pound. Almost uniquely among major economies, Britain didn’t experience a run on the ...”

“... When​ Neville Chamberlain declared war in September 1939, the Conservatives had been in power for a couple of decades, interrupted only briefly by the first two Labour governments. They had been in coalition for much of that time, but had always been the dominant party, and the government formed when the second Labour administration collapsed in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis was ‘national’ in name only ...”

“... who never really gets over what happened in childhood, in his case the death of his older brother, Neville. This left him feeling that death had made way for David Storey, but not enough. Neville died six months before David was born. Storey was ‘plagued by attacks of terror from the age of three or four’, accompanied by ...”

“... a tactful intimation that some judges no longer find this appropriate. How has this come about? Richard II in 1396 enacted that ‘no lord nor other of the county, little or great, shall sit upon the bench with the justices to take assizes,’ evidently because local grandees were doing it and it wasn’t acceptable. I owe this information, let me say, not ...”

“... instructive sign of the times. When Churchill died in 1965, we thought we were burying the past. Richard Crossman, a reluctant mourner at the funeral, wrote afterwards: ‘It felt like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’ But what era feels more remote today than that of Wilson and Heath, the great modernisers for whom modernity failed ...”

“... own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. The ...”

“... radicalism, his iconoclasm and idealism, his values and motivation, require further investigation: Richard Jay’s forthcoming study of Chamberlain will therefore be ardently welcomed by all historians. Chamberlain, with his racism, his jingoism and his frequent philistinism, may seem an unattractive figure today. For all that, as a catalyst, as a positive as ...”