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“... faintly ludicrous figure, the Sultan of Brunei, was in December 1985. Until around then – as Lord Chalfont obligingly mentions in the course of a work that can otherwise only be compared with The Lives of the Saints – the general view (endorsed not only by a public opinion poll but by me as well) was that the Sultan’s kingdom was ‘somewhere in ...”

“... but be dire. Somehow the idea had got about that it was a lively moment in the House of Lords when Lord Hailsham bounced up and down on the Woolsack, and that in the normal course of business there was nothing to be heard from the buttoned red leather benches – pictures of these had been seen in the colour-supplements – except the death rattle of ...”

“... Lord Zuckerman’s recent pronouncements on the nuclear arms race have been favourably received by a large number of people of surprisingly divergent outlooks. His words are piously quoted by spokesmen for CND, and have been endorsed with enthusiasm by Lord Chalfont, the scourge of unilateralists ...”

“... conscience and unless an article is “balanced” it would suffer from what he called the “Chalfont syndrome”. But it was precisely in Britain that the vainglorious Iranian royal family sought and found its biographers and publishers. Lesley Blanch is signed up to write a biography of the Empress. Margaret Laing is invited round to lunch with her ...”

“... Nigel Hamilton, son of Sir Denis, has had access, a privilege which was denied, for example, to Lord Chalfont (Montgomery of Alamein, 1976), who was told by the field-marshal that ‘if those papers ever came to light they would cause a Third World War.’ Nigel Hamilton was aged 12 when he first met Monty, who once introduced him to Churchill as his ...”

“... he said that no doubt the same arguments applied in their case. So there we presumably are. Lord Chalfont, who was Minister for Disarmament in Harold Wilson’s first government, contributes a one-page preface rich in his now well-known Moscophobic acerbity: ‘When it is pointed out to the unilateralists that they are doing the work of the ...”

“... discovery that the man pushing hardest for the opposite course was Stewart’s junior at the FO, Lord Chalfont. Chalfont was the first British minister ever to visit the Falklands. Later the friend of shahs and sultans and other unliberated tyrants, he then favoured a pragmatic sell-out of the Falklands if such could ...”

“... and others against the Spectator. (The magazine had reported him drunk in Venice: the late Lord Goddard had a bias against the press; and years later I remember Crossman, again in the ghastly Bung Hole, cheerfully admitting that he had been as drunk as – what? Not a lord, perhaps. A skunk?) These sorts of shifting ...”

“... in a puzzled passage early in this book, he was not alone in that. Ivor Bulmer-Thomas and Lord Chalfont, he points out, also speak English with hardly a trace of a Welsh accent; and he wonders if there is something in the air or water of the Eastern Valley of Monmouthshire that washes away deviations from standard English. The answer is that it ...”

“... on many of Metroland’s historic links. Fleeing the Great Plague, John Milton took a cottage at Chalfont St Giles, where he completed Paradise Regained. When an American proposed to dismantle the cottage and ship it across the Atlantic, there was rebellion and it was saved for Metroland and the nation. World War One inevitably left its mark. Our ‘flying ...”

“... Though he spoke with an upper-class English accent, he hadn’t issued a correction when Lord Dunsany, in a review, had called him ‘an Irish sportsman’, and he had published a story in Irish Writing.Hill had moved on by the time O’Brian delivered, but his replacement, Tony Gibbs, was delighted with Master and Commander (1969). It ‘leapfrogged ...”

“... I suspect there are more Londoners alive now who have been to Lombok than have taken the Tube to Chalfont & Latimer or Chorleywood out of curiosity. There was an anniversary to commemorate. Exactly 90 years before, at Easter 1915, the Underground had launched one of its periodic spring campaigns to encourage people to explore the countryside. Given that ...”

“... House of Commons, convinced, then as now, that the islands were British, threatened to bring Lord North’s ministry down if he yielded, and hoped to bring him down anyway if he fought and failed. The result was a compromise. The Spanish agreed to restore matters in the islands to the exact state they were in before the Bucareli expedition, to repair the ...”