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“... patient editor and Lord Weidenfeld Whose Idea it Was – these we have grown to expect and honour. Elizabeth Longford, now in her eighties, thanks two family doctors who ‘made life so secure for us’ (and who themselves survived to 90 and 86). She is grateful to one son-in-law for ‘introducing me to the perfect diet during a critical time in the ...”

“... Abroad, and despite the collapse of the ERM, the power of Brussels is increasing. Soon, all Queen Elizabeth II’s subjects will carry much the same kind of passport as their fellow Europeans; and that brave vestige of British self-consequence, ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires ...’, may fade from memory. The Empire has ...”

“... of a reigning monarch. The market is there – several markets indeed, and the name of Lady Longford is an indication that we are concerned with the upper end. She is not Crawfie – not so well informed on some matters perhaps, but better informed on many more. Moreover, she has come to us with the guarantees afforded by a biography of Queen ...”

“... to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a wife to do. Elizabeth Longford, in her introduction, describes this as a characteristic blend of ‘cold calculation and sensitive consideration’. The book consists of extracts from Curzon’s Tales of Travel, Russia in Central Asia and Leaves from a Viceroy’s ...”

“... for she is a writer in a very different tradition from such conventional courtly biographers as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-Smith and Georgina Battiscombe. She lectures in history at Birmingham University, she specialises in the study of early 19th-century popular protest, and her published work on the Chartist movement has been ‘written in ...”

“... and rose to the unwelcome challenge with genuine heroism. The best thing he ever did was to marry Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. She is usually said to have been the making of him, and so perhaps she was. The famous words which his brother used in his Abdication broadcast – that he found it ‘impossible to carry the heavy burdens of responsibility ... without the ...”

“... was 1981. It is difficult to react to Savage Grace without sounding like either Savonarola or Lord Longford. Some kind of moral judgment seems to be called for. No aesthetic judgment is possible anyhow, because this is one of those un-books composed of letters and statements by friends, acquaintances and witnesses. Presumably the statements were taped and then ...”

“... of it. Carrick-on-Shannon is (perhaps) a short drive away; in the other direction you’ll get to Longford in a while. If you don’t try to make sense of it, the barely mentioned place-names can only remind you how lost you are. It appears to be a novel of place. The events are quiet and agricultural: a funeral, a wedding, a harvest. The central characters ...”

“... and forty people went down with the Princess Alice, including the husband and two children of Elizabeth Stride. Her family gone, she took to drink, went on the streets. She became one of the victims of Jack the Ripper – the kind of ominous coincidence that fiction needs to avoid if it is to be plausible. Life itself can afford to be more extrovert. So ...”

“... her three sisters were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but ...”

“... weren’t quite sure what it meant. The journalist Maureen Cleave wrote to Keane that the earl of Longford, Thomas Pakenham (Anglo-Irish historian and brother of Antonia Fraser), ‘is dying to meet you. He has been reading all your old novels under the impression that you are J.G. Farrell’s mother. In any case he thinks they are very good.’ She was not ...”