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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... On another occasion he got into a fight inside the House with the Conservative MP Leo Amery, who in Maxton’s view had slandered a colleague. He was no Parliamentarian: he didn’t spend his time building alliances or toeing party lines. As Brown portrays him, Maxton was always in opposition, whatever the government. He was suspicious of ...”

“... was defensible, but was never properly defended, and as the career of Tory imperialists like Leo Amery suggests, it’s a view that justifies the creation of a welfare state rather than its destruction. Her supporters were busy enough tearing down what had been erected by previous Labour and Conservative governments not to notice the lack. Now the ...”

“... eased if the Indian government had been as solicitous of Indian nutrition as it was of European. Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India, looked back on it as ‘the worst blow we have had to our name as an empire in our lifetime’, which it probably was. To be fair, however, Britain’s colonial rulers elsewhere – where they were not thinned out ...”

“... among all classes. But informed interest and enthusiasm cannot safely be inferred. The 13-year-old Leo Amery, delighting his Harrow master by citing the Nizam of Hyderabad’s offer of money and troops to the Queen in the event of trouble with Russia as the most important political event of the summer holidays, was in a class of his own. Further down the ...”

“... advancing in politics. Seldom did he miss an opportunity, whether through the chance patronage of Leo Amery or an unexploited gap in the insurance market. He stood for Parliament at 23, ran the Young Conservatives at 26, was beginning to be seriously rich before he was 30. He has a chapter on his money-making, which was shadowed by vicarious controversy ...”

“... and to assuage communal strife. ‘You are wafted to India on a wave of hot air,’ he was told by Leo Amery, the secretary of state. ‘I accepted the viceroyalty in the spirit of a military appointment,’ Wavell explained in his diary at the end of the year. ‘One goes where one is told in time of war without making conditions or asking questions. I ...”

“... Greatest State of Texas. Louis himself is the not undistinguished author of a good book on Leo Amery among other things, but his co-editor Lord Blake is ... Lord Blake, former Chairman of the Rhodes Trustees, former editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, former ... no, the Disraeli biographer and Tory historian of the Tory Party. Although ...”

“... few English have believed – the separation of powers peculiar to our kingdom. Colported home by Leo Amery, the judgment of De l’esprit de lois re-emerges as the deeper truth of our institutions after all, whatever historians may say. This departure from the verdict of modern scholarship is not, however, pursued in any detail. For what Mount really ...”

“... exclaimed as he heard a champagne cork popping – a wisecrack fondly recalled by the imperialist Leo Amery, who loathed the League. Yet if the commission’s ethos was one of ‘benevolent imperialism’, it was still imperialism. Pedersen points out that ‘at no point did the Mandates Commission unambiguously endorse plans to create independent ...”

“... malevolence contributed significantly to the huge death toll in the great famine of that year. Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India at the time, at first tried to put the blame on the Indians, for over-breeding. In fact, it was a largely government-made tragedy, comparable in its effects (three million deaths) to the Nazi Holocaust (six ...”

“... against the Germans was assured, the champions of a new Western alliance (such as Duff Cooper and Leo Amery) saw it, Simpson says, as ‘a bloc linked by a common democratic ideology opposed to Russian Communism’. In public the bloc was always presented as a means of protection against a revival of German militarism, but ‘the real motivation was ...”

“... did not ‘see’ a man they mean they spoke to him on the telephone.’ On 12 February 1913, when Leo Maxse appeared before the Select Committee, it became clear that the secret of the American purchases was out. Maxse’s evidence was very damaging, but in reporting it Le Matin made the allegations which gave Rufus Isaacs the chance of revealing his and his ...”