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“... As Leader of the Liberal Party, Jo Grimond was stimulating, charming, full of flashes of insight, and often irritating. His memoirs, which are only partly about politics and otherwise consist of a leisurely amble through life in his constituency and with his family and friends, have much the same qualities. They are utterly unpretentious: ‘Not a contribution to serious history,’ he tells us, ‘but a series of footnotes to things and people as I saw them ...”

“... reconvened on Monday, the tributes were warm and widespread, and not just from his own party. Jo Grimond, the leader of the Labour peers said, was ‘a man who gave politics a good name’. Peter Barberis has written a book that endorses this judgment. It is a well-researched account of Grimond’s ...”

“... As Chris Cook reminds us in the latest edition of his History of the Liberal Party, it was Jo Grimond who turned round the depleted Liberal ranks and marched them towards the sound of gunfire. It seemed a risible endeavour, with Lady Violet Bonham-Carter and remnants of the Liberal ascendancy shoulder-to-shoulder with a street-wise generation of ...”

“... supported by moderate consensus Tories such as Whitelaw and Maudling, the former Liberal leader Jo Grimond and middle-of-the-road Labour politicians like Cledwyn Hughes. On the other side of the argument were the bogeymen of British politics – from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a ...”

“... a minority party, seldom expecting to be taken seriously and relying on a single performance by Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe or David Steel to give them whatever credibility they could earn. It was Labour that faced the real problem. Defeat for the leadership – often following a bitter row – saddled it with policies unacceptable to its own MPs and ...”

“... that he employed. He may not have had the authority or gravitas of his immediate predecessor, Jo Grimond, but he seldom failed to entertain his audience. Even within his own Party he was often thought to be a lightweight; but that never struck me as wholly fair. He had a consistent record on Europe and a notably courageous one on immigration and ...”

“... he still wore a white sweater with the Old Etonian colours. Later yet, he voted Liberal because Jo Grimond was an Old Etonian. The school gave him a taste for formality and occasional luxury. When, in 1933, he set off to explore the Abyssinian mountains of Arussi, he bought his provisions from Fortnum and Mason. Later, in the Sudan, he had khaki ...”

“... those of the most stunning women undergraduates, Anita Auden (a niece of the poet), Grizelda Grimond (daughter of the Liberal leader, Jo Grimond) and Maggie Keswick (daughter of the Hong Kong taipan, Sir John Keswick)’. Working-class undergraduates, one can only assume, were all ugly. Even Betjeman’s secretary ...”

“... and television. By the time of his election to the Liberal Party leadership in 1967, succeeding Jo Grimond, Thorpe had established a platform that would define liberalism and indeed much of the progressive agenda for the rest of the century and beyond. It was characterised by internationalism and anti-colonialism (particularly in Africa), a benign ...”

“... there was, perhaps, something injudicious about them. It was, for instance, at the age of 13 that Jo Grimond, plied with claret and port at the Provost’s board, returned to his house ‘just before midnight, very slightly drunk’. Luxmoore’s disapproval climaxed on Founder’s Day 1919, on which Monty revived the 16th-century custom of the Boy ...”

“... chaired by Roy Jenkins (then Labour), sitting on a platform together with Cledwyn Hughes (Labour), Jo Grimond (Liberal), Willie Whitelaw and Reginald Maudling (both Conservatives) and the diplomat Con O’Neill. Harold Wilson supported Britain’s continued membership of the Common Market, but did so from the sidelines, and – in a break from the norms ...”

“... marooned on the centre-right until around 1956, when it was rescued by the leadership of Jo Grimond and the Suez fiasco. Since then, as William Wallace shows, Liberal politics has revolved around a series of attempts to achieve a realignment of the Left with a view to restoring the Liberals to a major role. Realignment usually gets off the ...”

“... understood would have to be more than the Liberal Party alone if it was to achieve his mentor Jo Grimond’s dream of becoming a radical non-socialist alternative to Conservatism. Steel is patient and extraordinarily equable – qualities which had stood him in good stead with an excitable party and which were to prove essential in dealing with Dr ...”

“... a more interventionist social liberalism. As late as the 1980s the Liberals’ former leader Jo Grimond expressed disquiet about the easy and unthinking alignment of classical Liberalism with the alien creed of the Liberals’ allies in the Social Democratic Party. Not that such incompatibilities were confined to the Liberal-SDP Alliance. The Tories ...”

“... spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they have little hope of getting elected. Gladstone himself, whose eye for the main chance remained ...”