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“... Brenda Maddox’s enjoyable biography of Nora Joyce left me worrying about two questions.* Did her subject warrant 526 pages? And was the great Richard Ellmann, along with other scholars, guilty of gross invasion of privacy when he published James Joyce’s coprophiliac letters to Nora? Both these questions are of personal significance for me. Last year I published 738 pages about Victor Gollancz and have since wearied of defending myself against the charge of overdoing it ...”

“... What is the point of institutional history? For whom is it written? Here I declare my interest: I once wrote a short history of a merchant bank and I am at present working on a history of the Economist, which will be 150 years old in 1993. The former, which had to be circumspect and avoid upsetting the natives, was wholly written for gain; the latter, on which I have a free rein, will be written also for enjoyment ...”

“... all this, it is not surprising that these three books should strike a rather apologetic note. Ruth DudleyEdwards begins her portrait of life in the Diplomatic Corps with the words: ‘Of all British Civil Service departments, the Foreign Office has the most negative public image.’ Her task is both to show how ...”

“... wrote like that about Beethoven ... or me!’ I am gratified that this favourite anecdote opens Ruth DudleyEdwards’s biography.* It is long, over seven hundred pages, but brilliant, and, I think, astonishingly truthful. Victor’s posturing, egotism and other outrageous qualities are all there. At the same time ...”

“... victim’s job. Treachery and self-aggrandisement were part of the natural order of things in what Ruth DudleyEdwards, in this double biography of Cudlipp and King, comically describes as the glory days of Fleet Street. The two men had very little in common. Cudlipp, the youngest son of a travelling salesman, received ...”

“... Bagehot, in charge from 1861 to 1877. ‘Bagehot and the Economist are inextricably fused,’ Ruth DudleyEdwards declared in the paper’s official history, published in 1993, and the Economist has never been slow to celebrate the connection. Bagehot got a foot in the door by marrying one of Wilson’s ...”

“... blow up the Houses of Parliament.) Sentenced to life imprisonment, he would eventually become what Ruth DudleyEdwards described as ‘the spider at the centre of the conspiratorial web’ that would lead to the 1916 Rebellion in Dublin more than thirty years later. He was, in her ...”