“... in their exotic spear-waving poses. It was some relief to see the paperback of James Fox’s excellent White Mischief with its measured exposure of the shallow callous daftness of settler society circa 1940, popping cheekily up among them. Nairobi is still Africa’s safari capital, where the lucky tourist is offered all kinds of trips to ...”

“... Oh my God, how rich and powerful Lord Channon has become! There is his house in Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself suddenly as a copy of the blue room at the Amalienburg near Munich – baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no and all that ...”

“... until the war, making regular reports to the Treasury. As war grew near, the Government asked Lord Stamp to make a survey of the preparations for war being made by the separate departments, and to make recommendations. From this survey there emerged, at the end of 1939, the Central Economic Information Service, which gave way, a year later, to an Economic ...”

“... early 1950s derived from three intersecting factors: oil, the end of empire and the Cold War. As Lord Ismay put it, the purpose of Nato, created in 1949, was to ‘keep the Russians out, the Americans in and Germany down’. The purpose of US policy towards Iran at the time can be reduced to a similarly neat triad: excluding Russia, showing Britain the door ...”

“... during a performance of Hercules Distraught, a young recruit on guard in the wings recognised his lord and master got up in rags and fetters as the part demanded and rushed on stage to rescue him. It was here in this overlapping space that imitations suddenly seemed to become too real, and the real evaporated into mere artifice, an ambivalence that gave a ...”

“... dead grip. He stems from a long line of working men. His fellow workers need his leadership. Lord Stansgate walks the earth as Tony Benn. He comes to cleanse the temple with his whip. They’ve crucified him once. It felt quite nice. No reason why it shouldn’t happen twice ... Healey, meanwhile, turns beetroot red with rage, His jowls so vibrant he can ...”

“... found it difficult, conversely, to remember our first encounter. It is a slight relief to me that James Schuyler, who writes about reading almost as much as he writes about seeing, confesses to a similar sluggishness of feeling: Twenty-some years ago, I read Graham Stuart Thomas’s ‘Colour in the Winter Garden’. I didn’t plant a winter garden, but the ...”

“... what is it worth?’ Bibliophiles are like that, always asking what it’s worth, in cash terms. Lord Emsworth didn’t worry what his pig was worth. Gussie Fink-Nottle and Ken Livingstone love their newts for themselves, not for their market value. P.G. Wodehouse: A Centenary Celebration, 1881-1981 is also lumbered with a bibliography, which takes up half ...”

“... with ease, more ease than Dryden or Pope, could master in a lifetime. ‘That Rochester was both a lord and a courtier, as Pope was not, is one of the paradoxes which surround the English Augustan style and its curious patrician pretensions.’ Rochester isn’t uppish for the simple reason that he is already up, above the ‘strong coupleteering summations of ...”

“... 2. Donald Davie, from his memoirs, just published under the title These the Companions.3 And 3. Lord Longford, from his Diary of a Year4 – the year 1981. Each of these books makes much of its own modesty, of its willingness to expose its author’s true and warty face, and there has been a certain interest in comparing the three distinct styles of ...”

“... rights’, that his father must have been ‘the happiest man who ever lived’, that Foot loved Lord Beaverbrook ‘not merely as a friend but as a second father’, that Bertrand Russell ‘became one of the chief glories of our nation and people, and I defy anyone who loves the English language and the English heritage to think of him without a glow of ...”

“... with whom they were on especially intimate terms), writers (Barrie, Meredith, Hardy, Henry James), and theatrical people (Irving and Ellen Terry). Sargent painted Elizabeth, and Max Beerbohm drew no fewer than seven affectionate caricatures of her husband. Most of the cases Juxon narrates at some length are twice-told tales, and circumstances have ...”

“... Indeed the curtsies might have been stopped the year before had it not been for John Grigg (then Lord Altrincham) whose sensational article in the National and English Review on the future of the monarchy had included a savage attack on debutantes and all they represented. The queen is thought to have kept the ceremony going for one more year just to show ...”

“... guide to the exhibition by Hermione Hobhouse, and a first-class biography by Robert Rhodes James.* Albert took a long time to receive his deserts. Indeed I doubt whether he was fully appreciated during his lifetime. He was a foreigner. He disliked the rigmarole of court life and he was altogether too clever. The Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the ...”

“... had long ventured beyond the standard confines of the Grand Tour into Ottoman lands. In 1751 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett had undertaken a journey to Athens to measure and record the standing remains of the ancient city – the first time, they insisted, this had been done properly. In 1762 the Society of Dilettanti published Antiquities of ...”