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“... 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 ...”

“... that we are actually in the hands of General Sir William Jackson, GBE KCB MC MA, and Field Marshal Lord Bramall KG GCB OBE MC JP (JP indeed!). No artillery comes heavier than that. The title is also a little misleading: our generals tell the story, not just of ‘the United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff’, as they claim, but of higher defence organisation as a ...”

“... for us to deal with in Ireland now than the legacy of those who died or emigrated.The trustees of Lord Portsmouth are mentioned in the centenary brochure as subscribing to the cathedral fund. The following sentence is added: ‘Later, in the famine years, this family, which practically owned Enniscorthy, did nothing to aid their people.’ In my father’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Russia are no concern of ours. We only consider them in so far as they affect the war.’ Lord Curzon’s assurances to Bruce Lockhart, the British political agent in Russia, in February 1918 already had a hollow ring when they were written. The War Cabinet could not face the inevitability of an Eastern peace or the reality of the Bolshevik ...”

“... son (who later committed suicide). Restored to calm, I walk across St James’s Park, beneath Lord Nelson and up the Strand to Covent Garden. Robin has not slept either. Business, however, is good, and continues so for the rest of the day. A small independent publisher delivers an order personally. One of his eyes squints, but he is enormously ...”

“... horns sent signals across dark forests; they called the clan together, like Ralph’s conch in Lord of the Flies; they sounded a challenge on the battlefield. And this is where young Roland’s ‘slug-horn’ finds its place. As the hero’s ‘slogan’ it is, as it were, the ‘mott’ – both ‘fanfare’ and ‘saying’ – through which he ...”

“... to keep such a book. But,’ he confided to an interviewer shortly after he was knighted, ‘a Lord Chief Justice told me he was perfectly certain that no judge would ever blame me.’ When he retired in 1909, he burned all his papers. Unlike such courtroom performers as Sir Edward Clarke, whose career took off after Lewis briefed him in the Staunton ...”

“... volumes will be better or worse, and are most unlikely to amount collectively to the seamless web Lord Acton dreamed about for the Cambridge Modern History. So, do we need a New Oxford History of England? The old one, got off the ground with great promptitude by G.N. Clark in the Thirties, held up by the war, and finished with A.J.P. Taylor’s extra volume ...”

“... reason with an issue that cries out for long-term thought. A veteran Conservative stalwart, Lord Hodgson, has been appointed to conduct a review of the 2006 Charities Act, and he is on record as having announced that ‘nothing is ruled in, and nothing is ruled out.’ But it requires no supernatural gift of prophecy to predict that the opportunity ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... detected her ‘controlled hatred’ for it, while most of her fans regard her as supremely at home in it, using it as a vehicle for amusement and perception and something like comfortable fantasy. She repels and attracts; she can be attacked and defended. Nadine Gordimer, on the other hand, can only earn a chorus of dutiful praise. It must exasperate her ...”

“... 45 universities are attractive, efficient, and cheap. In 1978, they attracted 250,000 home and 40,000 overseas students. While Continental countries, notably France and Germany, make great efforts to attract students from overseas by subsidies and quotas, such students seem to come to Britain naturally, and despite all attempts at deterring ...”

“... it would … render them insolent to their superiors.’ One of the leading figures in government, Lord Eldon, who was lord chancellor almost without a break from 1801 to 1827, made himself, a contemporary historian wrote in 1828, ‘Licensor of the Press and Censor’. St Clair quotes Eldon in 1793, when he was only ...”

“... from the outset his prerogative and the hierarchical nature of their relationship (the one a ‘lord’ and the other a ‘vassal’). ‘I am sorry to say it,’ he wrote, ‘but I have too often observed, that fear, as well as love, is necessary, on the lady’s part, to make wedlock happy.’ As he knew she would, Bradshaigh responded angrily. ‘Without ...”