Search Results

“... of Jones minor) is now a sleek and rotund editor of something like the Times or the Spectator. Peregrine Worsthorne, in this rather idle but charming book,* strives to come across as a sort of Catholic version of Gray. His father was a member of that Belgian ruling class on whose behalf we used to be told we fought the First World War, and seems to ...”

“... in putting him to the question. A far more rewarding victim for the Scrutonian inquisition is Mr Peregrine Worsthorne, columnist of the Sunday Telegraph. Here is one who claims to be a true conservative, a believer in hierarchy, rank and heredity, a man of order. Under the cold eye, poor Peregrine quails. A few ...”

“... Peregrine Worsthorne has revealed himself as a Scarlet Pimpernel de nos jours. In his new book, In Defence of Aristocracy (HarperCollins, £15), the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph sets out, if not to rescue that persecuted class (of which he is ‘in part’ a member) from extinction, then at least ‘to engender a change’ in ‘the present climate’ of anti-toff feeling ...”

“... most of the newspapers were full of the libel action between Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times and Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph. It came to be widely accepted that this trial represented a clash between an Old Britain personified by Mr Worsthorne and a New Britain exemplified by the man Private Eye calls ...”

“... With that perceptive but strangely innocent eye which has served him so well as a columnist, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne recently expressed shock and astonishment that an editor of the London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail ...”

“... monarchy. Farrukh Dhondy, then commissioning editor at Channel 4, suggested that Howe spar with Peregrine Worsthorne, a former editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Worsthorne defended the monarchy on the grounds that it was popular, and that, thanks to the combination of monarch and Parliament, Britain was ...”

“... In a recent TV programme about King George VI, Peregrine Worsthorne commended his late sovereign for being a dull man, brains being the last thing the British constitution requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull ...”

“... he becomes so gloomy that he demoralises the conservative camp. Others on the right, notably Peregrine Worsthorne, try to stiffen Radji’s resolve by urging him to be less delicate. A sickly smell of paternalism and fatuousness rises from these figures. Lord George-Brown races out to Tehran just before the Ayatollah calls closing time to try to get ...”

“... of the Rolls – have elsewhere touched new peaks of pomposity and special pleading. Listen to Peregrine Worsthorne in the Daily Telegraph of 22 August:   In the old days the relationship between journalist and public man was a bit like that between servant and master. The journalist called the public man Sir and even remained standing in his ...”

“... to the old monistic Trollopian ways we should still be great – has earned her applause from Peregrine Worsthorne and Telegraph reviewers. Her contentions are less easy for the student of literature or the more orthodox Trollopian to swallow. It is not just novel items of vocabulary that one has to strain at. The whole language and orientation of ...”

“... says that you’re a bit of a bombshell, you get to hear about it? Would she recall the byline? Peregrine Worsthorne sportingly offered to introduce us. I eased my way over to her side. Worsthorne did his stuff, saying that he and I had just returned from a most interesting trip to Rhodesia. And here also was a good ...”

“... but fails entirely to notice the sequel three years later. In May 1988, the paper’s then editor, Peregrine Worsthorne, was persuaded to make a pilgrimage to the Sultan’s palace in Brunei. It was a journey he really should not have undertaken. Of course, his eventual report was spiced with his own idiosyncratic brand of irreverence: the palace, he ...”

“... States itself, I don’t know that journalistic association with it (of the kind undertaken by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne) would be anything to brag about, or indeed anything to condone. And Peter Wright and his associates confirm what is known from other sources – that British secret policemen did place themselves at the service of a foreign power in the ...”

“... however defined, and it is not hard to find them dancing on its open grave. Others beside Peregrine Worsthorne and William Rees-Mogg are seeking to write off whole branches of political thought as a proven failure. The ground, it would seem, is left bare of anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher; and the fact that she has at this very moment ...”

“... national and impressionistic history there is a political rather than a scholarly imperative. Peregrine Worsthorne made this clear when he argued recently for a new version of Britain’s past: an ambitious but strictly selective saga of ‘how the nation come to govern itself in a particular way and according to particular ideas of right and ...”