“... of career advancement. His style is what Roy Jenkins describes as macho – a word which the Chancellor of Oxford University pronounces as if it rhymed with ‘whacko’. Who knows what primal scene on the playing-fields of Bradfield engendered this constant need for young David Owen to play the hard man? It is probably best left as a secret between him ...”

“... rumour at Louth in October 1536 were duly enforced in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward and Elizabeth. So much for the events. But it is the interpretation of the events which has generated a small shelf’s worth of books and articles on the subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which Hoyle’s is only the latest, if the most ...”

“... the careerist who desperately sought public office, working his way up to become James I’s lord chancellor, only to be brought down by his political opponents on a charge of corruption. It used to be said that there was no connection between Bacon’s intellectual life and his public career. Macaulay set the pattern for this interpretation in an essay of ...”

“... neologism). Take, for example, three celebrated postwar resignations: Hugh Dalton in 1947 as chancellor for casually letting slip a couple of Budget secrets to a reporter while on his way to deliver the speech; John Profumo in 1963 as secretary for war for lying about his affair with Christine Keeler; and Amber Rudd as home secretary in 2018 during the ...”

“... his adult life hoping to lead. In the first general election of that year, Powell refused to back Edward Heath, the prime minister who had successfully negotiated Britain’s entry into the EEC. Both Powell and Heath concluded that the former’s lack of support cost the latter his job. In the second election of 1974, Powell went further and effectively told ...”

“... teaching officers were without a college fellowship. So the former secretary of the Cabinet, Edward Bridges, was invited to examine what could be done. True to form, the colleges turned down his main, and the university his secondary, recommendation. Commensality means a lot to Brooke. Cambridge should be a community of scholars not a nine-to-five ...”

“... celibate. As a result, many of the most vigorous and creative intellects – Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon and Newton himself after the Principia was published – left the universities for London in search of patronage, inspiration, new contacts and the throb of life. It was London indisputably, the centre of government, commerce, fashion, clubbery and ...”

“... On 2 April 1917 – as it happened, four days before America entered the war – Bonar Law, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, confessed to the Cabinet that Britain was down to three weeks’ supply of dollars and negligible reserves of gold. When the money did become available, it was on humiliating conditions: as Kathleen Burk has pointed out, the American ...”

“... are those who will never be able to bring themselves, even under the threat of Reagan, to want Edward Kennedy as President. Mosley did appreciate the existence, though not the nature, of the human craving to believe something. What he really offered to meet, though, was different: the human craving to believe in someone. (Not the satisfaction which looks ...”

“... governments, led by the Reagan Administration and closely followed by Mrs Thatcher and Chancellor Helmut Kohl. But apart from the obvious Schadenfreude his ideological opponents may derive from scenes like that of President Reagan scurrying around Capitol Hill to drum up support for the International Monetary Fund – an institution he had spent a ...”

“... correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps some of it was, but evidently much remains. I expressed the hope in the preface to my own book that one day ‘some wealthy foundation will finance a complete edition of the correspondence of the best letter-writer among all English ...”

“... life sentences for Pearton’s murder and four for manslaughter. One of them was 17-year-old Edward Conteh, who has an IQ of 71. To impute a degree of foresight to him stretches common sense, especially since CCTV footage shows him in the park riding his bike at the time of the stabbing. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven ...”

“... ally: the tomblike secrecy in which government was then conducted. The American sociologist Edward Shils pointed out that ‘the British ruling class is unequalled in secretiveness and taciturnity … No ruling class discloses as little of its confidential proceedings as does the British.’ Nothing leaked: not the lies the government told about how ...”

“... the demise of the Department of Economic Affairs, the cuts brought in by Roy Jenkins, then Chancellor, in 1968 and the battle over ‘In Place of Strife’, the paper which set out the legislation proposed by Barbara Castle, Minister of Labour, to limit the ability of unions to call disputes. There are some glorious passages: best is his description of ...”

“... exodus enthusiastically encouraged by the authorities, and in the early months of the regime Lord Chancellor Gardiner seems to have leaked advance warning of arrests, in the hope that the dissidents would take themselves off and save him the embarrassment of dealing with them. But the collapse was hardly less dramatic among those who remained. Mary’s ...”