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“... for the simple reason that he would probably have beaten Wilson in the ballot to succeed Hugh Gaitskell after the latter’s unexpected death in 1963. That he didn’t win that contest was almost entirely due to the justified anxiety of many right-wing and middle-of-the-road Labour MPs about George’s uncontrolled drinking, and their knowledge that ...”

“... As this suggests, the book takes an indulgent view of local colour. When one of the Greenes (Hugh) was involved in interviewing captured Luftwaffe pilots during the war, we are told: ‘His life was made easier by the fact that Luftwaffe crews often carried diaries and letters in their pockets, and he made use of his fluent German and his knowledge of ...”

“... arrangements that brought passers-by to a halt. Spry’s reputation was made. She worked with Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel and began to acquire her own celebrity clients. When Beaton photographed Wallis Simpson in 1937 wearing the notorious ‘lobster’ dress by Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, she posed with branches of foliage supplied by ...”

“... Imagine Esther Rantzen speaking for twenty minutes without notes. The Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore, fruitily delivered a maiden speech which took me back to Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, where I listened to him earlier in his career. Familiarity bred indifference, but Lord Cledwyn, next up for Labour, offered what sounded like sincere ...”

“... that the biography’s publishers, who already include Constant’s Music Ho! and his mentor Cecil Gray’s Musical Chairs on their list (perhaps they are planning to add Gray’s Survey of Contemporary Music or Bernard Van Dieren’s Down Among the Dead Men), felt that an investment in the Lambert field ought to be consolidated. Nevertheless, the ...”

“... reporters to pay especial attention to the coming man and likely successor in Downing Street, Cecil Parkinson. Beaverbrook was often wrong, oftener perverse, never that wrong or that perverse. The years of the Express’s slow decline are worth a book to themselves, so instructive are they about what happens when a presiding despot of genius ...”

“... the case of Britain, where nothing of that sort has been heard of for ages, unless it was Cecil King’s attempt in 1976 to interest some officers at a Sandhurst dinner to ‘stand for Britain’ against Harold Wilson and the political class generally. His reception was so frosty that he went home early. Civil-military relations in Britain are no ...”

“... Can historical biography still be written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him ...”

“... a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Cantos 17-27 by Pound (1927). The son of immigrant Jews in the East End, he was a conscientious objector when he met Butts, who was working for an anti-conscription organisation. They married two years later, had a daughter named ...”

“... in Switzerland and Russia; Compton Mackenzie became director of the Aegean Intelligence Service; Hugh Walpole ran the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau in revolutionary Petrograd; A.E.W. Mason, who had been a Liberal MP, was a secret agent in Morocco, Spain and Mexico; Hall Caine, whose new novels were given full-page advertisements, was engaged in Allied ...”

“... passed me by. As it was, the books I best remember reading there were the Dr Dolittle stories of Hugh Lofting, which were well represented and (an important consideration) of which there were always more. I think I knew even at six years old that a doctor who could talk to animals was fiction but at the same time I thought the setting of the ...”

“... though the account of it is inaccurate in almost every detail (old men forget), he warned me that Cecil King, because I declined to do something he asked of me, would make sure I’d never find another job in London. In fact, as I rightly supposed, Mr King, if ever he had any such intention, which is very doubtful, simply had not the power to achieve it. In ...”

“... thread through the random events of everyday life. In the earliest letters, written to her friend Hugh Lee in 1939 when she was working at Punch, her laconic colleague, the ‘subeditor from Lowestoft’ with his pipe, his ‘permanent flush’ and his passion for gadgets (he ‘has made a penknife and magnifying glass combined’), turns over the course of ...”

“... biographies of Jane Austen within a decade smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from quite ...”

“... called.’ Wilson did manage to persuade the director-general of the BBC, the normally robust Hugh Carleton Greene, to postpone that week’s episode of Steptoe and Son until after the polls closed in 1964, on the grounds that it might deter Labour voters from turning out. Wilson’s obsession later grew into a full-blown paranoid belief that the security ...”