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“... rented houses in ever more outré parts of town: at Worlds End, or even Fulham. Outside London, as James Lees-Milne observed, ‘the country-house way of life as some of us have known it’ would never be revived. Some debs’ parents diversified, opened their houses to the public or turned them into businesses. The Duke of Bedford put a jukebox and a ...”

“... rehouse the poor, did the conservation of heritage take on a Tory hue. In the absorbing diaries of James Lees-Milne, the preservation of country houses is revealingly linked with opposition to all the levelling tendencies of modern life. Lees-Milne, however, is not a typical voice of modern conservatism. The Thatcherism ...”

“... Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative talent, and perhaps that a creative talent never cramped a military one. The singularity of their careers has earned them a place ...”

“... love lives of these women and their later marriages, with more withering summings-up. Here’s James Lees-Milne describing Janetta in 1990, by which time she’d married a Spanish interior decorator, her previous husband Derek Jackson having left her for her half-sister: ‘now a bad seventy, straight hair pulled back like a skull-cap, one drooping ...”

“... his mentor, John got him into left-wing politics, and at various points he was in analysis with James and in bed with Julia. Philipps’s father funded him while he tried to develop a career as a painter, but even by the lowish standards of Bloomsbury he was a terrible artist. ‘Rosamond . . . is always driving him to it and making him “follow his ...”

“... and Christopher Sykes on Evelyn Waugh. On the other hand, we do get José Harris on Beveridge, James Lees-Milne on Harold Nicolson, O.S. Nock on Stanier, and Hugh Thomas on John Strachey. In such circumstances, where the great have already received the supreme accolade, there is little new to add. Much more interesting are the accounts of the ...”

“... after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about National Socialism.’ Wodehouse revised by James Lees-Milne. Fear of the mob; order and chaos. As with the world so with fiction: elephantine narratives, multiple versions running away from each other, stories begetting stories. How to keep it under control? ‘I’m talking about, I don’t ...”

“... of fun) who keeps cropping up in memoirs of the Second War such as those of Nancy Mitford and James Lees-Milne is Stuart Preston, nicknamed the Sergeant, an American serviceman who came over to work at US HQ in London, later taking part in the invasion. He seems to have very rapidly become a feature of the upper-class English social scene, setting ...”

“... had cried ‘Ourselves Alone’ and yet, following the inspiration of their executed leader James Connolly, had also linked their nationalism to the international struggle for socialism. Having lost all appetite for the patriotism that had been harnessed to the propaganda machine of the British state, Goldring imagined an England of the same stripe: an ...”

“... done by the Canadian troops billeted in the house during the war echo similar speculations in James Lees-Milne’s Ancestral Voices: Wednesday, 7 January 1942. Brocket. I walked across a stile and down a footpath to the James Paine bridge, which the Canadian troops have disfigured by cutting their names, with ...”