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“... which I must man whenever enemy action seems imminent.” The lynch mob apologised and slunk home and from then onwards my father fire-watched alone.’ Roy kept to himself the knowledge that the garage housed a defunct Morris Opal. If there was one thing the small happy family had set their heart on it was Roy’s studies. His mother’s eagerness for ...”

“... itself was not extinguished if the current peer decided to disclaim the title, the 14th Earl of Home would not have agreed to avail himself of the new procedure, even to become prime minister of the United Kingdom. There was too much at stake. The family’s old motto said it all: ‘A Home, a ...”

“... underestimate the ruthlessness of British gentlemen cradling endangered shares. On 19 September, Lord Home, as Foreign Secretary, met Eisenhower and discussed the Congo crisis. ‘The President expressed his wish that Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles; Lord Home said regretfully that we have lost ...”

“... hears. He is very ambivalent about Macmillan, whom he obviously cannot forgive for conjuring Lord Home out of a hat in 1963. Also striking is his dislike of Harold Wilson, who is, broadly speaking, depicted as having debauched British politics by an almost singular lack of principle. Indeed, in his account, not the least benign consequence of a Tory ...”

“... not writing for himself alone but for future historians. In the summer of 1963 Macmillan had sent Lord Hailsham to Moscow to negotiate the final stage of the treaty to ban nuclear tests. As Minister for Science, Hailsham had not been the obvious choice for such an assignment. But that same summer, when he expected to resign, Macmillan had told Hailsham that ...”

“... in any case: ‘genuine’ (or ‘tribal’) Africans felt differently. Any governor of a colony, Lord Swinton wrote, ‘probably has a much truer view of the opinion and interest of millions of non-vocal Africans’ than the agitators. One needed to go into the country areas. A native commissioner did just that, with excellent results; having explained the ...”

“... of Quintin Hogg suggest themselves. Perched upon the horsehair seat known as the Woolsack is the Lord Chancellor, hands clasped at the top of his walking-stick, tricorn hat sitting on his full-bottomed wig. On such a formal occasion he looked totally a man of the 18th century, so much did the face and manner fit the rigout. Most modern men in fancy dress ...”

“... of country houses, London clubs and Oxford and Cambridge colleges. The idea, spread by some, that Lord Butler (as he now is) was more ‘middle-class’, and therefore more acceptable to the rank and file of the Conservative Party, than Mr Macmillan with his alleged ‘grouse-moor image’ is rubbish. The difference between Marlborough and Eton means nothing ...”

“... Williams is carrying a copy of the News Chronicle, or why Jimmy Hill has an Arab headdress, or why Lord Home stands bat in hand before a broken wicket. Craig Brown says that in his caricatures Boxer mixed ‘the base and the suave’, but there is not a lot of baseness here, not much of the Rowlandson; and such fluent drawing can hardly help flattering ...”

“... Lord Randolph Churchill has many claims to fame and some to notoriety. His marriage to Jennie Jerome pioneered a series of matches between British aristocrats and American heiresses: the beginning of a special relationship of significance in the next century, if not in his own. He entered politics and rose to power between 1880 and 1885 as a master of opposition tactics both inside and outside the House of Commons ...”

“... The composer Lord Berners (1883-1950), as a dozen books of memoirs remind us, was very much a name in the Twenties and Thirties, in the sphere in which fashionable society meets the arts. His father was a naval captain and his mother the daughter of an exceedingly rich ironmaster (this last a fact which, with perhaps a touch of snobbery, he does not mention in his autobiography, First Childhood ...”

“... Except for one crucial fact – that his father became blind in adult life – his upbringing and home life were wholly conventional. His father was a successful junior barrister who never took Silk – a man of great intellectual powers, with a passion for gardens and gardening, a love for the more orthodox poets and an affection for the theatre, but ...”

“... redeemed from the archives of the Border nobility, with the blessing of a former prime minister, Lord Home. The memoir appears to have been written at some point in the 1820s, and is addressed to Frances’s daughter in order to acquaint her with certain passages in her mother’s early experience of an anxious family life. Frances died in 1817, the ...”

“... comments. The book ends with several long pieces of what Cockburn really wrote, which bring home the brilliance of his style, and especially his careful choice of adjectives. Lord Eskgrove with his ‘red visage, indecent nose, sly edging walk and a constant muttering of his lower lip … the very portrait of a ...”

“... but perhaps most remarkable of all in diet. The drawing process consisted of Lucian arriving at my home at what for me was the middle of the night, usually about 8.30 a.m. My bleary-eyed housekeeper would admit him, and the difficulties associated with bathing, shaving and dressing at that hour were summarily solved by a decision that he would draw me in bed ...”