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“... to the family name. The London Evening News printed its afternoon editions on primrose paper. Margot Asquith said that ‘when the Prince of Wales went up the aisle, he was a nobody compared to Rosebery.’ Until 1951 the Scottish football team would often turn out in primrose and rose hoops, the racing colours of Rosebery, who was their honorary ...”

“... say there is surely not going to be “warr” (pronouncing it like “far”). Dear, dear Mrs Asquith, can we not stop it?’ (wringing his hands) … ‘I do not understand what has happened. What is it all about?’ Millions​ of people then and ever since have shared the bafflement and anguish of Prince Lichnowsky and have asked the same questions. If ...”

“... Virginia Woolf’​ s body was still undiscovered, lodged under Southease Bridge, when Margot Asquith, approaching eighty, published her personal tribute in the Times. The two women had been friends of a sort (Leonard disapproved): both were leading lights in famous circles of famous friends; both possessed a conversational brilliance liable to be iced with cruelty, an intensity threatening always to pitch into dangerous hilarity ...”

“... recovery and embark on a second career, this time as an elder statesman. In the First World War Asquith brought him back as First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lloyd George made him Foreign Secretary. An elderly and immaculate grandee, he was still to be seen pottering about doing the occasional odd job for Baldwin’s Cabinet in the late 1920s. His career ...”

“... of his own mother, and he was always looking round elsewhere. In a letter to his little friend Margot Tennant, who would one day become Margot Asquith and an unconventional PM’s wife, he commented that it wasn’t so much that married people got tired of each other, ‘but often they become uneasy in each ...”

“... were born after he had remarried at the age of 75 – was to become famous and indeed notorious as Margot. W.E. Gladstone, allegedly more captivated by the challenge of the rhyme than by the personality of the 25-year-old woman who visited him at Hawarden in 1889, composed four stanzas of decidedly un-Homeric verse, each revolving around her name: ‘Though ...”

“... play by Oscar Wilde, starring a woman famous for her rumoured lesbian affairs, including one with Margot Asquith, wife of the Liberal leader and a good friend of the pro-German, homosexual and conspicuously Wildean Robert Ross. An article promptly appeared in Billing’s paper, now rechristened the Vigilante, describing Grein’s production under the ...”

“... founders. William, the ‘Fool of God’ who made such diverse sinners as Cecil Rhodes and Margot Asquith kneel and pray with him in railway carriages, remains something of a background figure in Pamela Walker’s pages. It is probably not a good idea to announce that a book began as a doctoral dissertation (almost a quarter of this one consists ...”

“... The Cathedral looks glorious without its windows.’ One is reminded of Churchill saying to Margot Asquith in the darkest days of the Great War that ‘I would not be out of this glorious, delicious war for anything the world could give me.’ On VE Day, the dean was in Moscow with Stalin. Two weeks later, he was among the first British observers ...”

“... would not be out of this glorious, delicious war for anything the world could give me,’ he told Margot Asquith in 1915. He dreamed of the mass bombing of civilians as early as 1917, pioneered it in Iraq in the 1920s, and made it Allied policy as soon as he came to power in 1940. By contrast, Bevin opposed the First World War, though he was in favour of ...”

“... to titles, including for himself, and he loved to shine in the salons of famous hostesses such as Margot Asquith and Ottoline Morrell. ‘Part of the fun of life was “to cause pain” to enemies,’ Mitchell records; cattiness about the dull and untalented was de rigueur. A rival elected by another college was denounced as a man ‘of no public virtues ...”

“... an email ending in “regards” and wondering what you’ve done to cause so much anger’. Margot Asquith and Venetia Stanley at the Scott-Sackville trial (1913) In the age of letter-writing, deciding how to start and finish was so much simpler. In 1926, Fowler listed the various ways to end a proper letter: Yours faithfully: To unknown person ...”

“... Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who married Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, was his paternal aunt. Tennant spent his childhood in the Glenconners’ mock-Jacobean mansion Wilsford Manor, in Wiltshire, being spoiled and doted upon by his ...”

“... another Liberal prime minister, though Gladstone never quite lost his head to the same degree as Asquith. Gladstone was a major statesman. So was Disraeli, and so was Palmerston, whose sex life was one of total libertinism. What makes them count in history is what they said and did in Whitehall and Westminster – not in bed. It is of course another matter ...”

“... played into his hands over the 1909 budget. If the opposition had accepted the budget proposals, Asquith told Margot, ‘we should have been left high and dry ... they would have romped in.’ By the time Lloyd George made his blunders over Marconi and the 1914 budget he was too prominent to be thrown overboard ...”