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“... Leo Amery, who lived and breathed the British Empire and could claim to have invented the Commonwealth, would doubtless find it sad that he is chiefly remembered for helping to bring down Neville Chamberlain. When, in September 1939, Arthur Greenwood, the acting Labour leader, rose to reply to Chamberlain’s ludicrously inadequate response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he began by saying he would speak for the Labour Party, but Amery, unable to control himself, burst out with ‘Speak for England!’ (In Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On this becomes ‘Speak for England, Arthur,’ but witnesses all say there were three words, not four ...”

“... and thrilled to bits by their own part in the proceedings. With the diaries of Leopold Stennett Amery we return to the politics of an era whose revelations are chiefly of interest to professional historians. And we return in the company of a politician who was often regarded as a long-winded bore. Amery’s ...”

“... it would seem, to saying anything very interesting or useful. A string of right-wing Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and Peter Temple-Morris deliver themselves of staggeringly banal pronouncements. In spite of some of them going on ‘fact-finding’ missions to the Middle East, they are as ...”

“... once did’. In Britain, we clearly treat ephemera of this kind with sad disrespect. Why was Julian Amery never invited to unveil one of the Blue Streaks that never were as an adornment to St James’s Park? When Mrs Finchley trades Polaris in for Trident, will the old model be put on public display outside the United Reformed church of that borough ...”

“... they fear that the Britain of their patriotic talk is no longer able to stand on its own feet. Mr Julian Amery, that fire-eater from the days of the Suez strike, should not be left out. He loves to contemplate launching attacks on foreign countries whose systems displease him: ‘It may be said that there were better ways of dealing with Gaddafi. As an ...”

“... have been thought their natural judgment. In the Heath Government we find the old imperialist, Julian Amery, emerging as an advocate of joint sovereignty with Argentina. Two years later, Jim Callaghan, the new Foreign Secretary, is countermanding this, and for Charlton he recalls the minute he sagely wrote: ‘Leave this poisoned chalice ...”

“... Rothschild 1970 (‘It must be worth about £70 a bottle’). There was Bollinger RD 1976 from Julian Amery and no less than a case of Krug 1975 from Chips Keswick. ‘Immensely generous of him’ is all that Wyatt can write. Can he really have expected us to believe that he was quite unable to put a price on it? There were few human transactions ...”

“... in discussion about Jerome K. Jerome. He shows rich contempt for right-wing emissaries like Julian Amery and Lt-Col. Neil (‘Bill’) McLean who were trying to restore something like the prewar Zog regime. He also dismisses (for the first time, to my knowledge) the notion, widespread in Whitehall, Langley, Virginia and the Kremlin, that Kim Philby ...”

“... claimants a veto over the policy of the United Kingdom. At the same time, the suggestion made by Julian Amery that, whatever the provenance of the document, it conveys the essence of official thinking in the Northern Ireland Office, is not easily dismissed. For two generations the views of high officials seem to have remained constant. As one of them ...”

“... politicians would have acted very differently; but that, of course, is not for them to prove. Julian Amery thought the ‘natural jingoism of the country’ would make the socialists rue their ‘anti-colonialist’ stand eventually, but there must be doubt about this. It was Macleod who pointed out to Macmillan in 1960 that in a recent opinion poll ...”

“... of distinction,’ Pincher writes. The list is long: cabinet ministers such as Duncan Sandys and Julian Amery; industrialists in the arms business such as Arnold Weinstock of General Electric and the Clark brothers, who ran Plessey together with ‘two splendid shooting estates’; the old airplane maker Sir Thomas Sopwith, who owned a lovely stretch of ...”

“... Grivas could be respected as a staunchly right-wing foe who one day might even make – so Julian Amery thought – a good dictator of Greece. But Makarios, the origin of all their troubles, was anathema to London. Handing the island over to him would be the ultimate defeat. For the Americans, on the other hand, still worried at the possible ...”