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“... majestic Edwardian canvas by his son Winston, and once in a delicate line-drawing of the 1950s, by Robert RhodesJames. But all this time, as Roy Foster’s book makes plain, another Lord Randolph has lain concealed by the conventions of portraiture. Winston, to whom his father was a divinity but also a stranger, wanted ...”

“... has been for more than a century, politically impotent and irrelevant. Simon Heffer and the late Robert RhodesJames have thought differently, and rightly so. Recent indignation over the ‘co-option’ of royal events by Tony Blair highlights the uses to which politicians can put the monarchy; it is hard to see why ...”

“... had introduced Cannadine and Cannadine had given us an encouragingly comical puff for his book, Robert RhodesJames reminded us that Lloyd George, despite doing so much to reduce the Upper House to impotence and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors ...”

“... a sort of glorified guide to the exhibition by Hermione Hobhouse, and a first-class biography by Robert RhodesJames.* Albert took a long time to receive his deserts. Indeed I doubt whether he was fully appreciated during his lifetime. He was a foreigner. He disliked the rigmarole of court life and he was altogether ...”

“... views on foreign policy in the Thirties were less wise and consistent than is usually believed. Robert RhodesJames, however, not only endorses the traditional appreciation of Eden’s periods as Foreign Secretary: he claims that his Suez policy was absolutely justified and only wrecked by wrong-headed and ...”

“... the past by Harold Macmillan and is protected now by the enthusiasm of men such as Roy Jenkins and Robert RhodesJames. But why should those of us who are excluded from this desirable club at Westminster want such an extended work of collective biography? In the case of these volumes one obvious reason lies in the ...”

“... general assumption was that Prince Albert had provided the definitive and approved working model. Robert RhodesJames has written an entertaining and effective but oddly out-of-kilter book about that model. His standard texts appear to be Justin McCarthy and H.A.L. Fisher, historians whose reputations had faded when Mr ...”

“... biography is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert RhodesJames. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an ...”

“... editors such as Garvin, press lords like Beaverbrook, businessmen like the elder Sir Robert Boothby, and above all the political eminence of Churchill, to forge the most improbable of political careers. In Michael Foot’s deadly phrase, Bracken was the classic ‘leather-lounged adventurer’, worming his way insidiously up the Tory ...”

“... on one of the compendious alibis put forward in extenuation of Eden by his faithful biographer, Robert RhodesJames. Why, then, by 1951, had Lloyd risen so high in the Conservative Party, to which he had only finally committed himself as late as 1944? One explanation is that he had a good war behind him. He was one ...”

“... years), that Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert RhodesJames dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to rationalise the contents of his hoard after the fact, and concentrated instead on his subject’s social and business interests and his ...”

“... membership of Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert RhodesJames in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons would necessarily reveal the ...”

“... Amery among other things, but his co-editor Lord Blake is ... Lord Blake, former Chairman of the Rhodes Trustees, former editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, former ... no, the Disraeli biographer and Tory historian of the Tory Party. Although Lord Blake is Lord Blake, it is exceedingly surprising that Louis did not instead procure the ...”

“... women minded it more), then it must have been as obscure as the hurt allegedly suffered by Henry James, since nobody so far has convincingly explained it. Ted’s father and grandfather were convivial, easygoing men, rooted in their native Kent, fond of a drink and ready to pinch any passing bottom. On his 80th birthday, Heath père, who had started life as ...”

“... here – as are the movies and documentaries, with Albert Finney following Richard Burton and Robert Hardy as a screen Churchill. As for approval ratings, in an admittedly contrived phone-poll BBC2 viewers last November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a ...”