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Instead of a Present

Alan Bennett, 15 April 1982

“... Mr Larkin, what do I call him? I feel like the student at a dance, suddenly partnered by the Chancellor of the University, who happened to be Princess Margaret. Swinging petrified into the cha-cha he stammered: ‘I am not sure what to call you.’ The strobe was doused in the Windsor glare: ‘Why not try Princess Margaret?’ A bleak smile from Hull ...”

Jousting for Peace

Thomas Penn: Henry VIII meets Francis I, 17 July 2014

The Field of Cloth of Gold 
by Glenn Richardson.
Yale, 288 pp., £35, November 2013, 978 0 300 14886 2Show More
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“... heart of a yet more ambitious project. Its guiding spirit was Henry’s ‘angel-tongued’ lord chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the man in whom, as the Venetian ambassador put it, ‘the whole power of the state is really lodged’. In war-ravaged 15th-century Europe, an old idea began to gain new impetus: the dream of a unified Christendom, bound ...”

Diary

Rosemary Hill: At Mars Avenue, 26 May 2022

“... where he was born, but it was an excuse to play with a new archive. I found him straight away. Edward Reginald Hill was just where I expected him to be, in Eltham, South London, an only child living with his parents. It was a bigger household than I had realised. His maternal grandfather and great-grandmother were living with them, but the address was more ...”

The Unfortunate Posset

Alice Hunt: Your Majesty’s Dog, 26 December 2024

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham 
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
Fourth Estate, 630 pp., £30, October 2024, 978 0 00 812655 1Show More
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“... family and relatives were given positions at court. His mother became a countess. His half-brother Edward was knighted and given the monopoly on the manufacture of gold and silver thread. His cousin Giles Mompesson held the patent for regulating inns. The sale of titles increased rapidly under Buckingham, swelling the House of Lords. In 1615 there were 81 ...”

In Pam’s Club

Azadeh Moaveni: Anglo-American Liaisons, 23 April 2026

Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power 
by Sonia Purnell.
Virago, 512 pp., £10.99, September 2025, 978 0 349 01475 3Show More
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“... stipend Harriman provided. This ‘mating dance’, Purnell writes, was her ‘true war work’. Edward R. Murrow was a celebrity foreign correspondent when they met. His dispatches from the front and from the bombed-out streets of London transfixed Americans and drew public opinion towards intervention. Purnell credits Pamela with advancing his ...”

To Serve My Friends

Jonathan Parry, 27 January 2022

Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire, 1600-1850 
by Mark Knights.
Oxford, 488 pp., £35, December 2021, 978 0 19 879624 4Show More
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“... status, but also safeguard their financial concerns. George Hudson, Robert Stephenson and Edward Watkin were merely the most famous representatives of the substantial ‘railway interest’ in the Commons, while several Rothschilds and Barings also held seats, allowing them to assist discreetly on their speciality, enormous international loans.The ...”

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

“... joy in the aftermath of the failure of the economic policies for which he had been responsible as Chancellor of the Exchequer in summer 1992, the collapse of which had nearly bankrupted the nation. (His wife was reported as having heard the former Chancellor spontaneously bursting into song in his bath.) Similarly ...”

William Rodgers reads the papers

William Rodgers, 19 February 1987

The Market for Glory: Fleet Street Ownership in the 20th Century 
by Simon Jenkins.
Faber, 247 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 571 14627 9Show More
The End of the Street 
by Linda Melvern.
Methuen, 276 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 413 14640 5Show More
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“... was a jaunty mixture of stale news and rather obvious comment about how Labour’s moderate Shadow Chancellor had suddenly become the scourge of the City of London. The rest was potted history, easily put together from cuttings and a quick look at the Crossman diaries. The profile ended with Hattersley, now 54, approaching his ‘most critical test’. The ...”

Damnable Rottenness

Lucy Wooding: More and More, 6 November 2025

Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England 
by Joanne Paul.
Michael Joseph, 604 pp., £30, May 2025, 978 1 4059 5360 3Show More
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“... of Martyrs’ John Foxe was torn between describing More the humanist poet and More the lord chancellor who brought godly reformers to trial; in the end the persecutor won out. Saint or sinner, scholar or polemicist, philosopher or politician – no single vision of More has ever commanded popular assent. When Erasmus called him ‘a man for all ...”

Celestial Blue

Matthew Coady, 5 July 1984

Sources Close to the Prime Minister: Inside the Hidden World of the News Manipulators 
by Michael Cockerell and David Walker.
Macmillan, 255 pp., £9.95, June 1984, 0 333 34842 7Show More
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“... For his part, Attlee was invariably laconic save on clues in the Times crossword. More recently, Edward Heath never quite overcame his unease with the press, while Harold Wilson could never wholly hide the peculiar fascination which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s ...”

On Thatcher

“... a more scorching erasure. Discrediting, and if possible disavowing, the prime ministership of Edward Heath was one of the earliest tasks of the Thatcherite project. It was what gave coherence to an otherwise confused and erratic new leadership. The leader knew what she detested long before she knew what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of ...”

Expertest Artificers

Kate Heard: Tudor Art, 19 February 2026

The Story of Tudor Art 
by Christina J. Faraday.
Apollo, 448 pp., £40, September 2025, 978 1 80454 739 7Show More
Holbein: Renaissance Master 
by Elizabeth Goldring.
Yale, 424 pp., £40, November 2025, 978 1 913107 50 5Show More
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“... Preaching​ before Edward VI and his council in June 1548, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, reflected that ‘in my time hath come many alterations.’ Gardiner was referring to the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the iconoclastic fervour of Edward’s reign, each of which represented a ‘great alteration’ of policy and sentiment ...”

Midwinter

J.B. Trapp, 17 November 1983

Thomas More: History and Providence 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 271 pp., £19.50, September 1982, 0 631 13094 2Show More
The Statesman and the Fanatic: Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More 
by Jasper Ridley.
Constable, 338 pp., £12.50, October 1982, 9780094634701Show More
English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition 
by John King.
Princeton, 539 pp., £30.70, December 1982, 0 691 06502 0Show More
Seven-Headed Luther: Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentenary, 1483-1983 
edited by Peter Newman Brooks.
Oxford, 325 pp., £22.50, July 1983, 0 19 826648 0Show More
The Complete Works of St Thomas More. Vol. VI: A Dialogue concerning Heresies. Part 1: The Text, Part 2: Introduction, Commentary, Appendices, Glossary, Index 
edited by T.M.C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour and Richard Marius.
Yale, 435 pp., £76, November 1981, 0 300 02211 5Show More
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“... interest More produced nearly a million words in half a dozen years, for half of which he was Lord Chancellor. By the end of 1533, when he gave over writing of this kind, the effort had helped to bring him close to despair. There had been some successes, but more failures. He had been able to pray his son-in-law, William Roper, back to orthodoxy, or so Roper ...”

Diary

J.P. Stern: This great wall has fallen down, 7 December 1989

“... welfare state of the Western European dispensation. ‘If modern Germany has a historic patron,’ Edward Pearce wrote recently, ‘it is not Marx, nor Bismarck, nor the Frederick the Great celebrated by East Germans’ –or at least by the party hacks who were dictating Kulturpolitik as relentlessly as the National Socialists had done – ‘but Walther ...”

Honest Graft

Michael Brock, 23 June 1988

Corruption in British Politics, 1895-1930 
by G.R. Searle.
Oxford, 448 pp., £19.50, November 1987, 0 19 822915 1Show More
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“... did not suggest that he was an expert at the political form of ‘insider’ dealing. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer’, wrote Frances Donaldson, ‘and the Master of Elibank had done what every tyro indulging in a half-guilty flutter does. They had bought half-way up a boom and sold excitedly at a profit. Then at the first serious drop they had ...”

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