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“... of departmental policy, such as Sir Thomas Dugdale’s in 1954 over the Crichel Down affair or Lord Carrington’s in 1982 after the invasion of the Falkland Islands, don’t happen very often. More recently, Michael Howard’s reluctance as home secretary to accept blame for the failures of the prison service introduced ...”

“... as long as its predecessor and includes more than 150 illustrations.‘I do warrant you,’ the lord admiral of the English fleet, Charles Howard of Effingham, reported from his flagship, ‘all the world never saw such a force as theirs.’ When it left Lisbon harbour on 28 May 1588, the Armada comprised 150 vessels, ranging from thousand-ton merchantmen ...”

“... Reach for the Stars,* which seems for half its length to concern her memories of her great friend Lord Mountbatten. They were in the middle of writing a novel together (Love at the Helm – ‘he was to do the plot ... then I would do the love’) when he was killed. She mentions, in case we had forgotten, that he was Viceroy of India and swerves suddenly ...”

“... the psyche of the capital. ‘One insurrection in London and all is lost,’ epitomised the sage Lord Liverpool. We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman ...”

“... Aitken bought the Daily and Sunday Express, turned them into successful popular papers and became Lord Beaverbrook in the process. In the 1950s Roy Thomson bought Kemsley Newspapers, added the Times to his empire in 1966, and was similarly rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords. Conrad Black came on the scene in the spring of 1985, paid £10 million for a ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... At the end of his official biography of Lord Mountbatten 25 years ago, Philip Ziegler wrote: ‘There was a time when I became so enraged by what I began to feel was his determination to hoodwink me that I found it necessary to place on my desk a notice saying: REMEMBER, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, HE WAS A GREAT MAN ...”

“... of inflation – job-title inflation anyway – we find the post of treasurer ennobled as lord treasurer or puffed up as far as lord high treasurer. In the 17th century, the office was put into commission, first in an ad hoc way and then permanently. Thus heroic social-climbing was succeeded by backstairs ...”

“... in a manger’ (anonymous), with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to ...”

“... an unpopular and alarming cause. He defied in his own person the caricature so crudely chalked by Lord Randolph Churchill that the supporters of atheism ‘were for the most part … the residuum, the rabble and the scum of the population; the bulk of them persons to whom all restraint – religious, moral or legal – is odious and intolerable.’ Nobody ...”

“... extreme left, at a slightly lower level, stands his only surviving son and heir, the ten-year-old Lord Blandford. Each of them is shown gesturing to the other, presumably because the artist wanted to create a connection in the spectator’s mind between the author of the family’s grandeur and the source of its future hopes. But the effect is to carry the ...”

“... of Emma Tennant’s Queen of Stones, you must first imagine that Virginia Woolf has rewritten Lord of the Flies. Interior monologues and painfully acute perceptions of a seaside landscape combine to colour in what is essentially a tale of a group of girls wrecked on a desert island. The fact that the desert island is just off the coast of Dorset, and has ...”

“... thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’ Holmes’s dictum is cited by Lord Steyn in a significant recent decision on prisoners’ rights as the third of four reasons for placing a high value on freedom of speech. The first is that freedom of speech is important for its own sake: this I take to mean that it is important to everyone ...”

“... it was exhibited at Windsor.) There were also some alarming attempts at cross-breeding. In 1773, Lord Robert Clive was determined that his zebra mare should mate with an ass. The zebra ‘shewed great disgust’ but Clive persevered: the ass was painted with stripes, ‘whereupon she accepted him’. (The mule that resulted from this union was said to be ...”

“... idol, Ronald Firbank.’ They co-authored five ponderously Firbankian novels, camply titled Lord Cucumber, The Silver Bucket, The Mechanical Womb, The Last Days of Sodom and The Boy Hairdresser. None ever made it into print. Between Us Girls, however, is a funny and colloquial diary novel in three sections, detailing the adventures of a young London ...”