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“... Let me first of all say this: the man is not a crook. So much for Lord Longford. As far as his appalling subject goes, I am disinclined to be as charitable. And charity, unfortunately, is exactly what this hilarious little book requires of me: Lord Longford having taken it upon himself to set in train a sequence of events designed to process Richard Milhous Nixon through redemption to beatification and ultimately, I suppose, to canonisation, it is essential that his persecutors must first be made to see him as a martyr and recant the error of their own ways in failing to appreciate the blessedness of his ...”

“... 2. Donald Davie, from his memoirs, just published under the title These the Companions.3 And 3. Lord Longford, from his Diary of a Year4 – the year 1981. Each of these books makes much of its own modesty, of its willingness to expose its author’s true and warty face, and there has been a certain interest in comparing the three distinct styles of ...”

“... Keith is a censor without knowing it, and Levin is good on censors of any kind. His review of The Longford Report is an exemplary job of demolition, made all the more convincing by his generous willingness to regard Lord Longford as something better than a buffoon. Commendably ready to hold an opinion no matter who ...”

“... to write a biography of the Empress. Margaret Laing is invited round to lunch with her publisher, Lord Longford, to straighten out her biography of the Shah. Rather late in the day Lord Weidenfeld suggests that Lord Chalfont take three years off to do a biography of Ashraf! And this ...”

“... about her having or spending lots of money. Yet she received visits from Lord Longford (she was a friend of his grandson) and Lord Hilton (‘a distant cousin of my mother’), and had a food hamper sent from Fortnum and Mason’s. On their last visit prior to her release, her parents arrived ...”

“... committees’ reports – namely, what should the law be? Conservative pressure-groups (but not Lord Longford) have often been reluctant to be tied down to any details for a replacement of the Obscene Publications Act, and radical feminism is at best uneasy, sometimes openly contemptuous, about the machinery of regulatory laws. In this, the feminists ...”

“... statements by the chairman – one Robert Kilroy-Silk. This is quite an achievement, since Lord Longford, himself no mean practitioner of PR, is a member of this group. It was, after all, Longford who stage-managed the coverage of the Beveridge Report – possibly the single most effective piece of promotion ...”

“... it was 1981. It is difficult to react to Savage Grace without sounding like either Savonarola or Lord Longford. Some kind of moral judgment seems to be called for. No aesthetic judgment is possible anyhow, because this is one of those un-books composed of letters and statements by friends, acquaintances and witnesses. Presumably the statements were ...”

“... Party, the Citizens’ Commission for Human Rights (a Scientology-run organisation) and by Lord Longford. Another ex-prisoner interviewed has been taken up by social workers, employed by the Save the Children Fund to introduce young offenders to their victims. He speaks of this experience, obscurely but suggestively: ‘I find it incredibly ...”

“... man she photographs in Hyde Park who has been accused of peeing in a public building as she is to Lord Longford, whom she presses into drying the dinner dishes: ‘Frank looked pale ... He said he would note it in his diary.’ She is convivial and an eager recorder of conversations. Talk she considers ‘frivolous’ can be redeemed by the production of ...”

“... to Labour – he had no interest in private luxury. Upper-class socialists like Hugh Dalton and Lord Longford occasionally alarmed him by raising the spectre of republicanism, but he found Attlee – once he had got used to him – greatly reassuring. In truth, no such nonsense ever stood a chance. King George and Queen Elizabeth were – deservedly ...”

“... make sophisticated table-talk about their fellow guests: ‘That’s George Melly. And there’s Lord Longford!’    ‘Not together? That would make the mind boggle.’    ‘No, at separate tables.’ It adds ‘sparkle’ to life, the narrator complacently observes, and ‘it can only happen in the metropolis.’ It would seem, too, that ...”

“... disorientation – and their reaction to it – was correspondingly sharper than those of others. Lord Longford (Eton and Christ Church) peeled off into a peculiar variety of religious activities. Tony Benn (Westminster and New College) decamped for the wild and intransigent Left. Paul Johnson (Stonyhurst and Magdalen) bolted to the radical Right. It ...”

“... many of the other characters, including Sinclair himself in a memorable walk-on (‘a flannelled Lord Longford: on sulphate’), are drawn, kicking and screaming, one assumes, from real life. Some of them I recognise. One or two of them I know. That is Sinclair’s autobiographical bit. Think of Downriver as if Alice had wept a river of tears, rather ...”

“... My forbearing husband/wife, my secretary who corrected my spelling, my patient editor and Lord Weidenfeld Whose Idea it Was – these we have grown to expect and honour. Elizabeth Longford, now in her eighties, thanks two family doctors who ‘made life so secure for us’ (and who themselves survived to 90 and ...”