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“... good leaders of the Party since it made its real start at the end of the First World War. Ramsay MacDonald was the first and he ended by making a lamentably false move. Clem Attlee was the second and he was too careful about his moves ever to make a false one. As to the Conservative Party, it stands for nothing beyond a desire to discipline the Trade ...”

“... The obvious candidate would have been the first man to lead Labour to power, but Ramsay MacDonald put himself beyond the pale: indeed, the psychological wound he left as ‘the lost leader’ was of more lasting significance than anything he achieved in power. Oswald Mosley, the most impressive of the Young Turks to contest ...”

“... flashbacks over forty years, strange doings between psychiatrists and patients. It is as if Ross Macdonald or Raymond Chandler had gone Gothic, while the principal movement of the fiction remained the same: California tilted into American allegory, skeletons in every designer closet, the glossy present built over a dark and denied past, a handsome house ...”

“... by her continued seclusion at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral, a young, clever, radical MP named George Otto Trevelyan published a pamphlet which had the effrontery to ask: ‘What does she do with it?’ Where, Trevelyan wanted to know, was all the money going which the Queen was paid by the Government for the sole purpose of maintaining the duties and ...”

“... will ever forget it. There, instantly accessible in their sliding metal racks, were the Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Beaverbrook and other papers; on a quiet day, when one was trusted, one could actually get out one’s own files. There also were to hand not only Hansard but Beaverbrook’s copies of the biographies and memoirs of practically every political ...”

“... the business. For all his brilliance, in the end his dynastic dreams were frustrated. His son George showed little aptitude for finance and left the bank in 1963 to escape his overbearing father. Eric, by contrast, had a son with banking in his veins who now runs the restored M. M. Warburg & Co in Hamburg, while S. G. Warburg & Co, once such a famous name ...”

“... went nuts. In September the same year, a random horror shook our village: a taxi driver called George Murdoch was robbed of £21 of takings and garrotted with a cheese wire just up from the old station at the east end of Cults. No one was charged. Then in October, I was cycling to school when I heard the sound of an explosion. The cushion of my bike tyres ...”

“... the amusing description of the little princesses giggling at a reception given by their father, George VI, or the anecdotes about George Bernard Shaw’s marriage. The vignettes of the men of power he knew are artful in a different way. Maisky was born Jan Mikhailovich Lyakhovetsky in 1884 in a small Russian town near ...”

“... to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and weed-choked concrete landscapes that appear again and again in JGB’s imagined futures, the collapsing buildings and insanely ...”

“... royal work, was twenty years in the making, but thought so dreadful that Victoria’s grandson George V had it destroyed (it lives on in various copies and mezzotints). She had laid out her vision for the picture in her journal: ‘the solitude, the sport, and the Highlanders in the water &c. will be, as Landseer says, a beautiful historical ...”

“... George V has been as fortunate in his biographers as any monarch could be. Not for him the lachrymose sentimentality which, at the Queen’s behest and with her all-too-active co-operation, Theodore Martin lavished on the Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of all the flippant irreverences of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, which caused George V to erupt with rage ...”

“... member of his family to hold that position. He had grown up sharing the family hatred of Lloyd George and it was rather against his better judgment that, in 1916, he accepted the director-generalship of the new Department of National Service, charged with making conscription a reality. He soon realised that he had been set up to fail. There was no plan, no ...”

“... a sense a veteran.’ He became Parliamentary Private Secretary to Labour’s new leader, Ramsay MacDonald, and then, in the first Labour Government, Under-Secretary at the War Office. In the later Twenties he was nominated by MacDonald to the Simon Commission on India; because of his involvement with this commission he ...”

“... Ramsay MacDonald christened it an ‘economic blizzard’, suggesting that the world slump of 1929-32 was an Act of God which his hapless Labour Government could not be expected to have foreseen or averted, much less mastered. John Maynard Keynes, by contrast, reached for a mechanical metaphor appropriate to the current state of the art ...”

“... Liberals as just a gentler, kindlier version of the Tories. That may sum up their role since Lloyd George launched his embryonic welfare state before the Great War. But it certainly is not a true picture of the Victorian Liberal Party, many of whose members were much nearer to Mrs Thatcher than to David Lloyd George. But it ...”