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“... talent for a dreamy sort of introspection: ‘You all sit and talk about each other’s souls,’ Lord Charles Beresford said. Their children, buoyant on champagne and self-belief, were the first to turn against them. ‘Their minds are almshouses [for] outworn notions and wrinkled phrases,’ Raymond Asquith, Margot’s stepson, sneered. ‘We do not hunt ...”

“... after winning a crucial censure vote in the Commons at three in the morning, the octogenarian Lord Palmerston ran up the stairs to the Ladies’ Gallery to embrace his wife, who had been present throughout. In 1867, after the successful passage of the Reform Act, Disraeli returned home, where Mary Anne was waiting up with a bottle of champagne and a ...”

“... of Canada have an embossed red crown on his official stationery? When Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, George successfully dissuaded him from calling a ship HMS Pitt, because the name was ‘neither euphonious nor dignified’, and the men might invent ‘nicknames of illconditioned words rhyming with it’. And opulence and privilege only ...”

“... is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just now.’ Although Zionist leaders could turn these anti-semitic notions to their ...”

“... in having himself appointed second-in-command to Roberts in South Africa, Commander-in-Chief under Curzon in India (until their famous quarrel resulted in Curzon’s resignation) and the Governor-General of Egypt – from which stepping-stone he confidently expected to return to India as Viceroy. The often embarrassing ...”

“... from the resident in Lucknow, Colonel John Low, and from the governor-general in Calcutta, Lord William Bentinck, to dispatch the offerings: two elephants, two superb horses with jewelled harnesses, sundry necklaces, bracelets and Indian manuscripts galore, together with a bedstead studded with diamonds and pearls, and an enormous oil painting (9'6" by ...”

“... while the inexhaustible Russian masses pressed in on her most valued possession, India. ‘Now,’ Lord Salisbury said in 1898, ‘with the whole earth occupied and the movements of expansion continuing, she will have to fight to the death against successive rivals.’ Fighting to the death can’t have seemed a very attractive option, if you believed what ...”

“... book with the timely observation that ‘Warren Hastings was our first Governor-General in India. Lord Mountbatten is to be the last.’ Two other fellows of All Souls, both lawyers, also had reason to be interested in Hastings at the time: Cyril Radcliffe served on the Boundary Commission for India, while the egregiously indolent John Sparrow would shortly ...”

“... In twenty years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All ...”

“... Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill reduced all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet crises. Arthur Marwick boldly opened up the whole question of war and social ...”

“... force. Robert Blake, in his Disraeli, quotes the Third Marquis of Salisbury, commenting in 1876 on Lord Lytton’s proposal to establish an Indian peerage: ‘Whether the Indian aristocracy themselves are very powerful may be doubted … but … their goodwill and co-operation, if we can obtain it, will at all events serve to hide to the eyes of our own people ...”

“... with ‘a boy from Ireland suddenly surrounded by lots of posh people’. It makes you wonder why Lord and Lady Wilde paid those school fees. Merlin Holland’s essay on his grandfather in Peter Raby’s Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde illuminates these appropriations by charting a series of significant errors through multiple versions of Wilde’s ...”

“... most dangerous product of modern civilisation – still, as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in the world’. Wilde, he wrote, was ‘charming, at the same time; unimaginable, and, above all, a very great personality ...”

“... Allenby to come home.’ Lloyd George took him by the arm and said, ‘You have waited five weeks, Lord Allenby, wait five minutes more.’ Fuming, Allenby waited – and got what he wanted. Allenby’s emancipatory decree, like others elsewhere, turned out to be a false dawn. The Egyptian fellahin noticed no substantial change in their lot. The opposition ...”

“... of women. Apart from dozens of other married women, he slept with his wife’s stepmother, Grace Curzon, her sister Irene and, after Cimmie’s death in 1933, her other sister, ‘Baba Blackshirt’ Metcalfe, who was married to the Prince of Wales’s equerry, ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe. Poor Fruity was a faithful member of the British Fascisti and had to put up ...”