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“... grandfather, a serious Liberal politician – the first Duke of Westminster. According to George Ridley, Bend’Or’s long-time employee and friend and eventually his estate agent and the executor of his will, Hugh Lupus was a major philanthropist, model landlord and altogether perfect duke. His son, Bend’Or’s father, died in Bend’Or’s ...”

“... vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely contributed a ...”

“... himself and his people adored him. In the end, like his mother, he gave his name to an age. Jane Ridley’s absorbing new biography shows that Victoria was horrified by her eldest son almost from the moment he was born. As a baby, he looked ‘too frightful’ and was ‘sadly backward’. The queen compared him unfavourably with his older sister Vicky, who ...”

“... on his formative years in rural Surrey. Although trained in the architectural office of Ernest George and Harold Peto, the older of whom was an able vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen ...”

“... the Westland affair and the resignation of Nigel Lawson; of her most ridiculous embarrassment, the Ridley affair; and of her one national electoral defeat, in the European elections of 1989. Perhaps if she had not insisted on inventing the poll tax, she might still be in Number Ten. But if so, she would be severely and increasingly constrained, more by ...”

“... caved in, by which time it was too late for Darwin to be flattered, or even much interested. As George Bentham, a former president of the Linnean Society, wrote to him, it was the French, not Darwin, who should be congratulated for finally coming to their senses. Bentham also suggested that the academicians had only been pretending to object to Darwin’s ...”

“... and admired for his pertinacity and skill, if for nothing else. But he has written with Ian Ridley an exceptionally interesting autobiography. Sporting autobiography is a difficult genre. Many are written but few survive. They are too often catalogues of games lost and won, or merely self-congratulatory. And they only rarely connect to the wider ...”

“... might well have exclaimed: ‘Iraq!’ So naturally I bristled like a retriever when George Bush began to compare Saddam Hussein with the leader of the Third Reich. Of course, since ‘appeasement’ is the standard metaphor whenever a test of American resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King ...”

“... pronouncing that there is one who kisses and one who turns the cheek. Serious in all she did, George Eliot was serious about her friends. Passages from Middle-march, from her own letters and those addressed to her and from Edith Simcox’s Autobiography reveal a cult of friendship foretelling that of Bloomsbury to follow. Edith’s remarks show that the ...”

“... of her uncompromising vision? John Major talks of a nation at ease with itself, and Nicholas Ridley told Newsnight: ‘The British want a rest. They don’t want to have everything turned upside down, they want a quiet time. I’m not saying this is an admirable quality of the British, because that’s why we keep falling behind, but ... if that is what ...”

“... in this apparently insignificant end of empire, to varied and sometimes unexpected effect. George Brown, briefly Foreign Secretary in the 1966 Labour Government, thought British sovereignty should be tidily ceded to the eager Argentinians. Michael Stewart, his successor, was more cagey. But he did draft a concessionary agreement, only to be driven by ...”

“... his mouth’ is unfortunately an incorrect translation of Hoffstetter’s original German. Jasper Ridley, Garibaldi Some twenty years ago the idea (come from England, no doubt) that cigars, like Loos’s blondes, were for gentlemen only, was dispelled by the scraggly mien of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s handsome head, both clad in US Army surplus ...”

“... they are incoherent enough to constitute a problem is always going to be the nice question. Take George Meredith. No one can regard him as a significant thinker now – almost all of his work is long out of print – but for a few decades at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th he was the cutting edge, a highbrow’s highbrow, and he ...”

“... not only those few hymnodists who have been accepted or half-accepted into the literary canon – George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as ...”

“... was shut to him. Naturally, James was very right-wing. He’d been a disciple, he still boasts, of George Kennedy Young, an MI6 agent who became deputy chairman of Kleinwort Benson. James describes Young as ‘a brave man’ who ‘knew the difference between good and evil’. In fact, Young was a racist of a pretty poisonous variety who never let his business ...”