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“... Toryism, old or new, whereas something deep in Carlyle’s has been potent enough to persuade Simon Heffer to follow in the footsteps of his Peter-house mentor, Maurice Cowling, and see whether Carlyle can be given the final accolade. It seems a pretty tall order, even though, as every schoolchild knows (as Macaulay used to say), Carlyle became in ...”

“... that the monarchy is, and has been for more than a century, politically impotent and irrelevant. Simon Heffer and the late Robert Rhodes James 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 Prime ...”

“... Simon Heffer​ has had an idea. He has had them before, but he has fattened this one up into a book of enormous proportions. Huge quantities of factual narrative have been injected into it, in the hope of beguiling reviewers into acknowledging its historical respectability. For all that, the underlying argument is simple – the title gives it away ...”

“... Australians, and Gooch will escort him off the field, brawny arm wrapped around delicate shoulder. Simon Heffer, in the Evening Standard, wrote a more ill-tempered piece, in which he deplored the fact that Mr M. Atherton (Manchester Grammar and Cambridge) was frozen out of Gooch, G.’s secondary-modern circle. The likes of Gooch – the dependable ...”

“... side, with or without a degree to show for it (and a very nice time most of them had of it, too). Simon Heffer in the Daily Mail took up his predictable cudgel on behalf of the beleaguered privileged classes. The head of the university funding council, however, has said that Bristol’s admissions policy is ‘fair and equitable’, and even Charles ...”

“... the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer, with profuse footnotes displaying considerable scholarship and intermittent pedantry.As Heffer says, Channon was seen as ‘trivial, snobbish, shallow and profoundly lacking in judgment’, a toady to the ...”

“... Carlyle’s reputation was sunk long before the Nazis took him along to their Götterdämmerung. Simon Heffer gives a useful account of the ‘long and damaging fall from the pedestal’ in the first chapter of his 1995 Life of Carlyle. The extent of that fall can also be gauged in the acres of cheap Victorian editions still to be found in secondhand ...”

“... A miasma of doubt hung over the tale for another forty years until smart detective work by Simon Burgess for a Radio 4 documentary revealed that the widow did exist and that one of her friends had written to Powell about her. Her name was Drucilla Cotterill, and she had been teased by the Jamaican children whose families had moved into the ...”

“... conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of Simon Heffer and the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long ...”

“... also disliked ‘the babble of toleration’. Carlyle was writing what his most recent biographer, Simon Heffer, called an allegory of England. Much of that allegory would not have been wholly congenial to most of his readers, who did not regard parliaments or toleration as mere ‘babblements’. Cromwell’s relative religious toleration ...”

“... helpful to Leave.EU were each sent a Fortnum’s hamper for Christmas. He names the names: Simon Heffer of the Daily Mail, Andrew Pierce of the Daily Mail, Christopher Hope at the Daily Telegraph and Caroline Wheeler at the Sunday Express. He even quotes Heffer’s thank-you note: he found the hamper at home ...”

“... about the operations of Militant in Merseyside. In his new book on Labour’s future Eric Heffer misses the significance of these operations.2 Merseyside has appalling problems, and Eric summarises admirably the extent of the deprivation, and the extent to which the current government’s policies have compounded an already near-intolerable ...”