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“... had been unhorsed, however, the steam seemed to go out of the relationship. Early in the Gulf War, John Major was invited by one of his more neanderthal backbenchers to indulge in a routine spot of BBC-bashing during Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons. Major pointedly declined the opportunity and went out of his way to compliment the World Service on ...”

“... This went badly awry. ‘If a noble family cannot rebuild their own castle,’ thundered John Ruskin, ‘in God’s name let them live in the nearest ditch till they can.’ The popular view that stately homes were part of the national heritage was now challenged by the Radical view that they were the national heritage, wrongly appropriated. With an ...”

“... and was a friend of many of his most interesting contemporaries, Cecil Beaton and James Lees-Milne among them. He loved female company, was ‘much sought after by hostesses for his sparkling conversation’ and by 1953 had established a reputation as a biographer. Two volumes on the life of Richard Monckton-Milnes, the late Georgian politician and ...”

“... author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not ...”

“... published nearly twenty-five years ago, remains an indispensable pioneering work; more recently John Pilling’s Autobiography and Imagination provided some interesting studies of particular autobiographies by eminent Anglophone or Continental writers but without much discussion of the nature of autobiographical form. Jerome Hamilton Buckley and ...”

“... is so good at tracing. Her long books about those highly equivocal figures Edmund Gosse and A.A. Milne showed the unusual powers she possesses as a biographer. She eschews brilliance for the sake of the contingent but possibly significant detail: one would not wish any of her studies a word shorter. Returning to Lionel for a moment, we find the poor boy ...”

“... had a number of early leads, and also a hunch about Michelle Taylor. Michelle worked alongside John Shaughnessy, Alison’s husband, at the Churchill Clinic in Lambeth, and the police quickly picked up the gossip about an affair between them. For some weeks, however, the hunch didn’t seem to be leading anywhere. The police were in the process of dealing ...”

“... sentiment. When presented with this evidence in a series of articles in the Guardian by Seumas Milne in July 2000, de Bernières emailed the journalist to say that he was ‘no longer as sure of anything as I once was’ and that he would be prepared to change his mind on the ‘production of convincing evidence’. The makers of the film (in production ...”

“... for the author to provide something more than a lesson in how to suck eggs. Stephen Gilbert and John Cook (along with just about everyone else) would agree that Potter reached his reflexive nadir with Blackeyes, in which the story of the eponymous model based on the central character, Jessica, is related as a novel authored by Jessica’s uncle, but ...”

“... the massive resistance of capital, labour, finance and public opinion. Unlike the Webbs, Mosley or John Strachey (in the authoritarian phase of his Coming Struggle for Power), PEP’s most outspoken planners still held to a belief in planning within an open democratic society. Yet they achieved this worthy position by evading the question of power. Power was ...”

“... it to an end. Indeed the curtsies might have been stopped the year before had it not been for John Grigg (then Lord Altrincham) whose sensational article in the National and English Review on the future of the monarchy had included a savage attack on debutantes and all they represented. The queen is thought to have kept the ceremony going for one more ...”

“... perhaps, like Winnie-the-Pooh. Carpenter would have us believe that the sentimentalities of A.A. Milne, so greatly in evidence throughout the Pooh and Christopher Robin saga, are never very far removed in spirit from an adult mockery of the whole business of childhood. Milne, he says, is simultaneously sentimentalist and ...”

“... the ‘gunpowder plot’ and literary impostor (a category not yet extinct). In the latest volume John Stone-house appears as politician and confidence trickster, but Harold Philby is dubbed Soviet agent rather than traitor and Klaus Fuchs gets by as theoretical physicist. Other less controversial occupations include entrepreneur, man of letters, geologist ...”

“... order of service is a scream,’ I said. ‘A reading from The West Highland Railway by John Thomas?’ ‘Well, there you are.’ ‘Also a reading from The Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 1911-34. Followed by a bit of Macaulay’s “The Passing of the Second Reading of the Reform Bill”, read by Lord Mayhew. Address by Alasdair ...”

“... wrote in the vernacular of the drawing room but with the ruthlessness of an avenging prophet. A.A. Milne wrote in an early introduction to Saki’s stories: A strange exotic creature, this Saki, to us many others who were trying to do it too. For we were so domestic, he so terrifyingly cosmopolitan. While we were being funny, as planned, with collar-studs and ...”