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“... with the Egyptian ambassador’. Churchill’s publicity machine was often wildly insecure. When Lord Halifax was sent off as ambassador to the US, bogus baggage was placed on the Port Jackson at Liverpool to fool the Germans, and when it turned out that the Port Jackson wasn’t going to America, the baggage was transferred to the Warwick ...”

“... stories currently in circulation. Haldane’s dismissive manner later lost him his job as lord chancellor – when war was declared he was denounced as a German sympathiser and hounded from government – but in 1909, despite his misgivings and although the police hadn’t yet turned up a single suspect, he gave in to the popular outcry. He set up a ...”

“... jerkins and some old shirts’, which Saveer’s wife ‘threw away so soon as they were brought home’. Little Will met a man called Owen Gibbons, who agreed to help him with the gold, loading it onto his horse (later, no one could say where it had been taken).Most of the villagers seem to have been preoccupied with collecting the millions of loose raisins ...”

“... to shoot big game, including wolves, a lynx and a polar bear, which were displayed in his home alongside the birds. Another bear he killed was stuffed and placed in the entrance hall of the Kennel Club, where he served as vice-president from 1899. By the time of his death, according to his diaries, Salter had bred 2123 dogs and owned 2696.They are ...”

“... At the end of August 1996 both my daughters left home to take up graduate scholarships in America. I knew that they would probably never again spend extended periods in my house, but persuaded myself that I had ‘coping strategies’ well in place. Within days of their departure I embarked on a more than usually expensive holiday, a Hellenic cruise ...”

“... Osborne and Balmoral were largely his inspiration. Balmoral has remained the favourite country home of British monarchs to the present day and Osborne became Victoria’s favourite in her latter years. Most leading politicians disapproved of Albert at first and then came to appreciate him. This was true even of Palmerston, who was at feud with the Prince ...”

“... to Honderich, and so is Iain Macleod. The most glaring exclusion of all, however, is that of Lord Hailsham. Honderich is aware of Hailsham’s existence since he makes a heavy joke about his trousers, which Honderich calls his undergarment, but he is evidently not aware of his books. With the leading post-war Tory thinker in politics thus consigned to ...”

“... about Dr Runcie’s travels: Hasn’t it all got rather out of hand? A disintegrated church at home is not healed by fixing its gaze on distant shores and the residual politics of post-imperial times ... England stands at a disadvantage as compared with other components of the United Kingdom – with Scotland, Wales, even Ulster, though this is a more ...”

“... of Carter’s Administration, was obvious. Poor Bert had got into trouble with his own bank at home in Georgia and owed about three million dollars. Abedi lent him the three million. It was never repaid of course, but the two men were firm friends for life. Another much more distinguished convert was Clark Clifford, the beautifully-spoken lawyer who had ...”

“... Working​ in 2010 on a knotty judgment about the power of the home secretary to include additional criteria in immigration rules that she had previously laid before Parliament as required by statute, something clicked in my memory. Four centuries earlier, in 1611, in a decision known as the Case of Proclamations, it had been ruled that ‘the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … The King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him ...”

“... The End of Decline: Blair and Brown in Power, as well as biographies of the Labour Party eminences Lord Goodman and Hugh Gaitskell. He met Naqvi’s family just after his arrest in London. The pivot of the book is Abraaj’s planned sale of Karachi Electric to a Chinese company, which Brivati contends made Naqvi a danger to US national security ...”

“... to observe the impact of safe injection sites and the Scottish government tried to persuade the Home Office to allow local authorities to run pilots. The stasis that followed was the result of Westminster intransigence and a lack of courage (plus an exercise in grievance politics) on the part of the SNP and its then ...”

“... a true aristocrat will be wearing very filthy and ragged old tweeds; or again that, if you are Lord Grey and Foreign Secretary at a moment of national crisis, your heart nevertheless does not lie there but in birdwatching. In Buchan’s novels there is a nice variant, which we may call the principle of ‘not being really there’ (it recalls ...”

“... and about to leave school for London when an extreme crisis overwhelms him. He cries out to the Lord Jesus, much as his father might have done, to ‘come now and take me to be for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise’. The Lord Jesus (like Godbole’s Shri Krishna in A Passage to India) neglects to come, and straightway the ...”

“... taken the fateful step of becoming a Calvinist. He obtained the patronage of Louis Chasteignier, lord of La Roche-Pozay near Poitiers, and in 1565 accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to Italy. Despite his Calvinistic contempt for Italian scholars and the Catholic Church – he preferred talking Hebrew with the learned Jews of Mantua and Ferrara to ...”