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“... serving sentences in English jails. Headlines announced that IRA killers had been ‘sent home’ (‘home’ being another maximum-security prison in a different part of Britain). Major, we were told, was ‘livid’ and demanding an inquiry. Lord Tebbit was outraged. It was a ...”

“... specialists should receive the training and exposure which generate competence and expertise. Now Lord Mackay, a new Lord Chancellor whose openness and intelligence are an undeserved windfall for the Cabinet, is right when he says that a specialist corps of advocates will undoubtedly survive the Green Papers. It will ...”

“... to write a biography of the Empress. Margaret Laing is invited round to lunch with her publisher, Lord Longford, to straighten out her biography of the Shah. Rather late in the day Lord Weidenfeld suggests that Lord Chalfont take three years off to do a biography of Ashraf! And this after ...”

“... it, of all hands, to be mightily and diligently looked into and cared for.’ On 18 August the Lord High Admiral, Howard of Effingham, wrote from his flagship, ‘Some made little account of Spanish force by sea, but I do warrant you, all this world never saw such a force as theirs was’; and even later Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge was by no means ...”

“... Little Willie, becomes engaged to Lucy Horsehurst, the nymphomaniacal daughter of the amiable Lord Cravenburn, the only imperial dignitary who could be persuaded to attend (a reference to the fact that the organising committee failed to attract even minor royalty, and disregarding such helpful suggestions as Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw and ...”

“... He had hoped to visit, among others, Erasmus Darwin, but finding the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set ...”

“... only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic episode in the ...”

“... fairway, the author of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was already melting under the impact of A.J.B. Lord Vansittart, a junior at the Foreign Office when Balfour was foreign secretary, confessed that he found it ‘hopeless to avoid devotion’. The secret of Balfour’s charm was his nonchalance. Staying cool seemed to be his only rule. Vansittart thought that ...”

“... councils in England, became not all that many years later the most right-wing, authoritarian home secretary in living memory. Stephen Pollard’s biography tells us what happened but it doesn’t quite tell us why. One of the reasons for Blunkett’s status in contemporary politics is that he was born into real hardship, a qualification which is much ...”

“... by ship, he had shot off a sheaf of telegrams to the new (post-Stalin) Soviet leadership, causing Lord Salisbury to threaten resignation for the umpteenth time. But it was all foolish and in vain. When he heard he’d won the Nobel Prize (in 1953, for his war memoirs) he became tremendously excited until told that it was for Literature: ‘His face ...”

“... Lord Todd’s describing himself as ‘a chemist’ is not mock modesty but a true representation of how he sees himself and chooses to be seen by others – no ordinary chemist, mind you, but the supremo of British chemistry for very many years and a figure of world rank as well. He is a Nobel Laureate and a peer and has been President of the Royal Society and the Head of a Cambridge College; he has earned, too, what must surely be the rarest and most prestigious of all doubles – membership of our own Order of Merit and of the Order Pour le Mérite, the German model of our own ...”

“... book​ could be written about British prime ministers and Zionism. It might begin in 1840, when Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary and prime minister-to-be, received a letter from his stepson-in-law Lord Ashley, an MP better known later as Lord Shaftesbury, the Tory philanthropist ...”

“... tell, they were seriously funny and devoid of serious meaning. There was no more Wodehouse at home; my father took a dim view of frivolous books. But my local library took a dim view of the contemporary unless it was slightly unfashionable or too popular to ignore – and the shortage of more recent fiction left room for two whole shelves of Wodehouse. I ...”

“... sepoys, a string of greyhounds, a yacht and a stud of pedigree Arabs. He sought to make himself lord of Arabia by an alliance with the Wahhabi, which instantly flopped. Undaunted, he turned north to try his luck with ‘our Koordistan’, admiring the purity of their mountain lifestyle. The romanticising of the Kurds became less popular with the British ...”

“... as to maximise its literary importance. All Southam’s principal deductions are supported by Lord David Cecil, in a foreword written with that critic’s customary charm, his inimitable blend of middlebrow thoughts in upper-class tones. Though he cavils gently at Jane Austen’s taste for Grandison (‘I cannot help sympathising a little with Miss ...”