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“... on the political figures who opposed the war, prominent among them Robin Cook, Clare Short, Charles Kennedy and the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. The accompanying text read: ‘You can aim your own missiles at the cowards and traitors who opted to support Saddam Hussein rather than the brave troops who laid down their lives for freedom.’ At ...”

“... and 1979-97. There is a basic failure to understand a key question of political sociology here. Charles Kennedy bemoans the fact that the turnout in elections is falling, pointing out that the 71.4 per cent turnout in 1997 was the lowest in any general election since 1945 and was followed by a further slump in the 1999 Euro-elections, when fewer than ...”

“... the editor of the Times) for the Union presidency. Like one of his successors as Liberal leader, Charles Kennedy, he became an MP at a young age and came to public notice through his entertaining performances on radio (particularly in Any Questions?) and television. By the time of his election to the Liberal Party leadership in 1967, succeeding Jo ...”

“... niche. The most ‘human’ politicians I have seen so far have tended to be Liberal Democrats: Charles Kennedy, Conrad Russell, Menzies Campbell. But then, it will be said, politicians such as these can well afford to be themselves. From the two interested parties, Kenneth Clarke is, of course, known to be attractively ‘robust’, not to say ...”

“... reasonably intrude here. The Liberals today, as always, are nothing if not fissiparous. Besides Charles Kennedy’s Lib Dems, there is another Liberal party: the Liberal Party, properly so called. Its lineage is impeccable. It exists nationwide, if patchily, it fights elections, it is entirely unsuccessful. The media never mention it. Its relevance ...”

“... And on defining issues – Suez for him, Iraq for us – more radical than Labour? In this sense, Charles Kennedy can truly claim to have put the Liberal Democrats in the firing line by an exercise in leadership that only in hindsight looks more obviously correct – and hence less courageously bold – than it seemed two years ago. In 1956 we were ...”

“... places, like Dover, where immigration politics always matter, but at the Romsey by-election Charles Kennedy made such a point of his comparatively liberal attitude to asylum-seekers that hardly any voter could have been unaware that asylum-seeking was an electoral issue. Although psephological wisdom has it that the Conservative defeat was due to ...”

“... the Rockinghamites (nominally headed by the Marquess of Rockingham, but whose effective leader was Charles James Fox) and the followers of Lord Shelburne. This ministry was riddled with dispute, and on Rockingham’s death in the summer of 1782 the Foxites abandoned Shelburne’s new government, which itself imploded in the spring of 1783. As in 2010, when the ...”

“... took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960. This was wise and far-reaching advice, for without Johnson on the ticket Kennedy would not have been elected. Consequently, without Graham’s intervention there ...”

“... the one great aim of his career. Much later, he was promised a Liberal Democrat peerage by Charles Kennedy, which also never materialised. These rejections both spurred him on and crushed him. Sadly, life at the Bar has not changed a great deal since Carman began in practice. He almost left it a number of times in his early years because of the ...”

“... though this applies more to the editors of newspapers – the recent revelations about Charles Kennedy’s alcoholism. No one was especially surprised when the Liberal Democrat leader confessed on 5 January: journalists had known – and had been dropping hints – about his drinking problem for a very long time. They had refrained from ...”

“... all. It is a sign of the passing of time that on the dustjacket of this book the name of Ludovic Kennedy is five times bigger than Lindbergh’s. Half a century ago, nobody’s name was bigger than Lindy’s. Lindbergh was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, the son of a Congressman; his parents parted when he was 14. He left school at 16, learned farm ...”

“... custody at the hands of Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. Despite these anomalous features, Kennedy’s assassination was – conceptually speaking – a straightforward event. While academic historians have had plenty to say about his politics and legacy, they have largely ignored his death. That subject – perhaps the canonical event in amateur ...”

“... brothers’ invention would be acquired, second-hand, as it were, from the single machine which Charles Rolls was planning to purchase from them. There would be no direct relationship between the British Government and the Wright brothers, and all the hand-shaking and banquets in their honour when they visited London in May 1909 were merely a guise by the ...”

“... and English readers will get some idea of Mansergh’s consequent relationship with his leader, Charles Haughey, if they consider Mephistopheles and Faust. Bruce Arnold is English, and has lived here for many years. His weekly column in the Independent is undoubtedly pro-Government in taste and bias or, more accurately, anti-Fianna Fail. This has become ...”