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“... accomplished? No junior minister more aptly represented that mood than the patrician Thatcherite Alan Clark. A big landowner, a poor QC and a minor historian, the jolly Clark decided to write a diary while in office. From 1983 to 1991, during which time he occupied three offices – Under Secretary at the Department ...”

“... before – and with more pleasure to her then I think in all the time of our marriage before’.) Alan Clark’s Diaries 1983-91, published a few years ago, were applauded for their beastly candour but Clark was nowhere near as winningly ingenuous as Pepys. Mrs Clark was generally ...”

“... It was the patrician Alan Clark who most accurately summed up the approach of the British and American Governments to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Nothing, he reckoned, was better for business than a lot of foreigners killing one another. This has been true of all foreign wars throughout the ages, but for businessmen of the Clark mentality a hot war in the Eighties which demanded endless supplies of expensive weaponry and technology was almost too good to be true ...”

“... diaries, edited by John Lahr, which are to be published in October. Among the slogans (‘Think Alan Clark meets Alan Bennett’ – no, don’t) and the paraphernalia (a padlock and key) is a pamphlet of highlights. A good many of the selected entries concern spanking, and a good many others are anecdotes about ...”

“... Willyism. Everyone says Wicks is useless. This seems the only satisfactory way to write about the Alan Clark Diaries: set out hunks and small slivers like a buffet for the prospective readership to nibble and savour. The book has been ineptly ill-reviewed so far: furtive pieties on the infidelity front, squeaks from the girls on the Via Femina and bursts ...”

“... I knew Kenneth Clark by sight some time before he spoke to me. It was in the late Fifties, I think, at the press view of an exhibition of 20th-century English painting, that words were exchanged. We must have got there very early, because no one else was in the gallery. I was standing in front of a big Pasmore and Clark was coming to look at it ...”

“... were three government ministers, William Waldegrave from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Alan Clark from the DTI and Lord Trefgarne from Defence. On the agenda was what to do about the export of arms and arms-related equipment to the Gulf region in light of the changed circumstances brought about by peace. To the extent that the Howe guidelines ...”

“... Each and every​ place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner guests, to the château in Normandy belonging to his second wife, Nolwen, where, in his later years, he tried to find ways to communicate with the lovers who had once hoped he would marry them ...”

“... the school holidays from Harrow. For a time his family owned Saltwood Castle, now the lair of Alan Clark and terrible with banners, but the pile proved to be ruinously expensive and the family moved from castle to country house. The Wall Street crash of 1929 obliged the young Deedes to quit Harrow and its unattractive headmaster Cyril Norwood. Deedes ...”

“... that Alistair McAlpine was writing his memoirs some optimists hoped he might match the diaries of Alan Clark, whose sustained and entertaining indiscretions caused such exquisite pleasure. No such luck. At least three-quarters of McAlpine’s book is a dreary account of a dreary life, whose most interesting passage is a tip about how to light a ...”

“... the DETR, Prescott blusters and bungles away, the Peter Principle made flesh. Other ministers – Alan Milburn, David Blunkett, Stephen Byers – briefly shoot skywards, flare and fizzle. Through the passing show Mullin is by turns wryly amused and appalled, but often just alienated, a Meursault of the red boxes. Despite his Bennite past, the alienation is ...”

“... so still seems contemporary. The most startling revelation is that it includes a character called Alan Bennet (sic) who is described as ‘in his late forties. He is neatly dressed but there is an indefinable quality of failure about him’.Coward’s play was staged in September 1960, a month after Beyond the Fringe, and a year after I had appeared on the ...”

“... trenches and his overmastering desire to avoid a repetition. Some years ago, I was interviewing Alan Clark MP about his book The Donkeys, a rugged study of British Great War generalship which became the script for Joan Littlewood’s Oh What A Lovely War. He suddenly said to me: ‘I daresay you’ve been told I’m a Fascist.’ I admitted that I had ...”

“... fall of Milosevic, which was brilliant.’ But there are some great little sketches, as when Alan Clark is added to a North London dinner party as a last-minute guest. The Braggs arrived and Melvyn was horrified. He said he loathed Alan C. Alan and Jane arrived in one of his ...”

“... That snobbishness hasn’t disappeared. Take Michael Jopling’s celebrated remark, quoted by Alan Clark: ‘The trouble with Michael is that he has had to buy all his own furniture.’ Willie Whitelaw is quoted as saying that he is the kind of man who combs his hair in public, though that sounds too mean for Willie. There are also the big political ...”