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“... Although Dr Peck’s absorbing book centres on the career of an individual, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, it is not intended as a straightforward biography. As its title indicates, the author’s aim is to study, in relation to one outstanding individual, what Dr Peck sees as the crucial fields of patronage and administrative reform. Northampton was born in 1540 as Henry Howard, but in tracing his descent Dr Peck confuses the second Duke, who destroyed the Scottish army at Flodden, with the third, who succeeded in marrying off two of his nieces, one after the other, to Henry VIII ...”

“... of Graham of Claverhouse, later Viscount Dundee, For King and Conscience by Magnus Linklater and Christian Hesketh. This book examines dispassionately the involvement of Claverhouse in the attempt to impose conformity on the South-West of Scotland, starting with his military defeat at Drumclog by those Kiernan labels as practitioners of passive ...”

“... decorated with photographs of cross-sections of the living brains of unwell Greeks I meet Graeme Hesketh, an English radiologist married to a Greek cardiologist. He’s lived in Greece for thirty years. He’s a tall man with a sardonic expression, in a pale blue tunic and trousers and orthopaedic sandals. He hurt his foot recently and it hasn’t brightened ...”

“... to remain as fruitless as Lord Longford’s. Like his friends and mentors Hugh Kingsmill and Hesketh Pearson, Muggeridge mocked the world’s follies but never learned to be sufficiently humbled by the turmoil within himself. He could detect it, but he blamed the world for that too. Self-indulgence and severity towards others are the same vice. The ...”

“... of the equally philistine nabobs; both were the declared enemies of the chivalric conception of Christian England which Burke defended, with a sometimes unbalanced eloquence, in the final years of his life. There was, then, something almost prophetic in the positive comparison he had made between France and Bengal in a speech in the Commons in 1783. Where ...”