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“... me free …” that sort of thing. But where was God now, with Heaven full of astronauts and the Lord overthrown?’ It’s a question that many have grappled with, including Joni Mitchell, lightly paraphrased here. The lines are from ‘The Same Situation’ on her 1974 album Court and Spark: Still I sent up my prayer Wondering where it had to go With ...”

“... in the mid-1930s – his own late forties. Not much wildlife about and we were thinking of heading home when a plump cock pheasant whirred across the ride looking for a spot to roost. I raised the gun, but while I was still fumbling with the safety catch an elderly figure leaped out with startling agility from a bend in the avenue. He wore a battered felt hat ...”

“... children of the 1860s. Jim liked to tell the story of the silver paper knife his father brought home on one occasion with a handle in the shape of a naked woman, and how his blushing mother had called her ‘“a shameless hussy” and hid the knife under a clock’. Like stories about covering up piano legs, it was Ede’s generation’s way of laughing ...”

“... to be demobilised from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap. In the cluttered, narrow-windowed living-room of our house in the village of Hempton Green in Norfolk, my mother and I progressed from letters to words to ...”

“... To Sotheby’s where I’m reminded of a lunch given for Alec Guinness in 1989 when I sat next to Lord Charteris, the Provost of Eton and previously the Queen’s Private Secretary. Talking of A Question of Attribution, then playing at the National, he remarked: ‘Of course, the question everybody asks is whether the Queen knew and whether he knew that the ...”

“... by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where I do not pee). It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now ...”

“... been wounded on active service and who had two sons serving in France (and five other children at home). She owed the landlord less than a pound. The factor was prevented from entering her house by a crowd including the local ILP councillor, John Wheatley (one of the ILP MPs elected in 1922, and responsible in 1924 for the Housing Act, which enabled central ...”

“... or matter-of-factness into their ceremonies. The invitation to the recent memorial service of Lord McAlpine included the brisk line, ‘We have taken a large church’ – meaning St Paul’s. On the other hand, the real aristocracy very often still have the worst of it, as the late Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, wrote in her wonderfully candid ...”

“... her mother, but not until well into adult life. I feel that with R.B. Haldane, the philosophical Lord Haldane of Cloan, as brother-in-law I, too, would have swung to Conservatism. There was too much philosophy, too much ethical responsibility, too much intellect about. Does Benton realise the vast certainties of the Haldane stance? Naomi jumped into marriage ...”

“... the fact that the rest of them are canards did not prevent them from growing into chickens coming home to roost or even, in one or two cases, fully-fledged albatrosses. If Churchill was the victim of the first – a composite lie assiduously put about by the Labour Party – he was the perpetrator of the second. Numbers 3 and 4 originated in a mixture of ...”

“... refused to help a politically incorrect body. The corpse started a long and halting journey back home, got stuck at endless African airports, began to decompose. Eventually, Barnum got it disguised as a Taiwanese spare part, smuggled it across the Zimbabwe border and the great Soweto funeral show could go ahead at last. Various factions disagreed over which ...”

“... the Master that blindness barred him from most sports, the question was determinedly pressed home: ‘What games do you play? Cricket, Rugby, Tennis?’ Such tenacity, such singlemindedness. And it was much the same with other dons he met. A philosophy tutor gave him the titles of five hefty-sounding volumes and told him to read them by the following ...”

“... original if somewhat amateurish begetter of methodical inquiry into the membership of Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons ...”

“... yet had capital to spare to lend to foreign governments, build railroads and other public works at home and abroad, and lastly, and very reluctantly, supply long-term finance to British manufacturing industry. On this last point, Kynaston shows much better and more concisely than all the vast ‘decline of Britain’ literature why the City and the men from ...”

“... sense, but the response to a crisis which is either close to death or mimics it. Death itself, Lord Yama, repeatedly fails to keep dates, even when Jasmine has arranged her wedding to him, in the form of sati. Jasmine’s several incarnations are more than a device. They exemplify the main power a passive character has: to become someone other and stop the ...”