“... little reason to blame the media when things went wrong. This Other Club consists principally of Baldwin, Attlee, Heath, Callaghan and Thatcher. Attlee consented to have a telex machine installed in Downing Street only so that he could keep up with the cricket scores. When Hugh Dalton had to resign after leaking the contents of his budget to a passing ...”

“... for the family firm, fundamentally different characters. The wonder, however, is not that ‘David’ should have turned out badly but that ‘Bertie’ should have turned out so well. (There were two more brothers, ‘Harry’ of Gloucester and George of Kent, whose capacity for kingship, had the succession moved further down the line, was for different ...”

“... in charitable work in the East End. The couple had six children. In February 1910 their son David died, aged five, from diphtheria. Eight days later, MacDonald’s mother died (he had no contact with his father). Then, in September 1911, Margaret died of blood poisoning. Even in the 1930s MacDonald still imagined himself walking along, ‘holding the ...”

“... and by German demands for treaty revision. On 10 November 1932, the deputy prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, about to set off for a disarmament conference in Geneva, had told the House of Commons that when war broke out again the only question would be ‘Whose morale is shattered quickest by preliminary bombing?’ ...”

“... when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise wasn’t the downfall of May’s advisers so much as their earlier rise to brief but utter dominance in a party whose upper reaches have in recent times seemed to belong almost exclusively to Old Etonians. Hill was born in ...”

“... from this line. In 1965, the year of the Selma to Montgomery marches, he debated with James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union, where he declared that Baldwin’s very presence in the chamber demonstrated the beneficence of Western civilisation. Baldwin carried the argument, but ...”

“... in his recent memoir, Between the World and Me. Formally modelled on the first part of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the book is addressed to Coates’s teenage son, Samori, on the occasion of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of ...”

“... Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John ...”

“... Moorman’s book concentrates on the period before his return to Cambridge as Regius Professor (a Baldwin appointment) in 1927. Only two of her ten chapters concern his life after 1927, whether from discretion or from lack of materials is not made quite clear. Lord Trevelyan, a diplomatist, throws more light on Trevelyan and his family in ‘The Master’, an ...”

“... a minority government was fatal to the chances of there ever being a Liberal administration again. Baldwin may, as several historians seem ready to accept, have been an exceptionally skilful party manager with a sensitivity to public opinion bordering on genius, but he lost the Election of 1923 entirely through his personal decision to go to the country on the ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and minutely studied by politicians, students of ...”

“... David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported ...”

“... speak of Birkenhead’s ‘sober dignity’ as Lord Chancellor, and ‘sober judgments’ in Baldwin’s Cabinets, when he was already hitting the bottle extensively. At the end of this massive book, Campbell’s Birkenhead remains the same bifurcated being to whom Garvin had drawn attention – lovable to some, loathsome to most, and baffling to ...”

“... Lloyd George preferred to parade his thoughts before a handful of sympathetic Liberal journalists. Baldwin kept amiably distant. Neville Chamberlain, while courting the newsmen, was most accessible to papers soundly Conservative in tone. Churchill remained aloof except to the more exalted proprietorial ranks, though an editor or two would occasionally be ...”