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“... the night or would entertain them on one of his four concertinas. He was sports-mad, startling Gladstone by turning up at Hawarden on his bicycle, missing lunch with the kaiser in order to see the Eton and Harrow cricket match and throwing bread rolls with deadly accuracy at the Lyttelton dinner table. When in Scotland he liked to play two rounds of golf a ...”

“... of this book, anywhere. They do not appear in the biography of Arthur Machen by Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, though Peterley Harvest has some vivid pages on Machen. From this biography, published three years after Peterley Harvest, the facts of Peterley’s narrative may be verified. There was, for example, a dinner held in Machen’s honour at the ...”

“... two-party system. Confronting each other as party leaders in the House of Commons for longer than Gladstone and Disraeli, Wilson and Heath displayed the qualities of a great prime minister – sensitive antennae, spontaneous wit and tactical adroitness; businesslike efficiency, consistency of purpose and strategic vision. The trouble was that Wilson had only ...”

“... steel magnate and Liberal MP who twice refused a peerage (though he accepted a baronetcy from Gladstone), she was a wealthy and well-connected woman who went East to escape the constraints of Victorian society. She was related by marriage to some of Britain’s most influential families, including the (Lord John) Russells and the Trevelyans; her ...”

“... States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John ...”

“... Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the task in his monumental edition of the Gladstone diaries. Matthew became the founding editor of the ODNB in 1992, and much of the credit for both the conception and the early stages of execution of the work clearly belongs to him. When he died suddenly in 1999 at the age of 58, the structure he had ...”

“... and the House of Lords. The actual picture, Dr Alderman reveals, was much more complex: William Cobbett himself was fond of referring to the ‘blaspheming Jews’, Gladstone was a Whig and a great opponent of the Jews at one and the same time, while Disraeli was a Tory and the final Emancipation Act itself was a ...”

“... connections, Bute was decried as the new Highland adventurer. It did not help that another Scot, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, who was dogged by the smear that he was intent on importing Scots Romanist principles into the English common law, had become lord chief justice in 1756. Might Bute and his Scotch cronies find no better use for Magna Carta, English ...”

“... they, like Blair, have seen what was going on, and mastered it? Or would they have blown it like William Hague, whose declaration, on the morning of Diana’s death, that people would probably miss her lively personality (but by implication nothing more) was one of the truer things said that week, but nevertheless something that for ever identified him in ...”

“... the rest of Hong Kong, ‘ceded in perpetuity’, back to mother China. That lion-hearted Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, who died while he was trying to solve the Irish Question, said of the First Opium War, which ended with Hong Kong under British rule: ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its ...”

“... and Irish affairs, contributed to a sense of general crisis. MPs demanded better government; William Pitt’s premiership after 1783 depended not just on providing it but on being seen to do so. Since the 1760s, popular tribunes like John Wilkes and John Cartwright had been changing the terms of debate by demanding more press freedom and more political ...”

“... points. Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of them voted in favour of a no confidence motion in ...”

“... tour for the Jewels of the ‘Titanic’, most of them found in 1987 in a remarkably preserved Gladstone bag. The idea is to relive the catastrophe from a safe distance, keeping its romance and forgetting its horror. The exhibitions use the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s trick of giving visitors the name of an actual person with whom to identify; at the ...”

“... George Lewes (though Jane refused to have Mary Ann Evans in the house), Lady Harriet Baring and William Bingham Baring, Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller, Ruskin, Ellen Twisleton, Margaret Oliphant, Froude: practically everybody, or at least practically everybody who either liked to talk or could bear, as Carlyle grew into stentorian middle ...”

“... best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord Rothschild. They were much clearer about what they ...”