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“... eight hundred years of history gave a 14th earl’ may suggest an unduly deferential image of Alec Douglas-Home – the name to which he was born and to which he reverted between 1963 and 1974, before retiring from politics as Lord Home of the Hirsel. It was under the courtesy title of Lord Dunglass that he first made his mark in politics, carrying Neville ...”

“... on over the summers of 1910 and 1911, at Hill House, the Epping home of the hostess and patron Mary Hunter. She was the wife of a coal baron and said it was her ‘sacred duty’ to spend all her husband’s money. In that ambition she seems to have been mostly successful. James, Rodin, Thomas Beecham, Edith Wharton, Sargent were among her many fans and ...”

“... is no acknowledgment of the debates over women’s rights, sexuality and reproduction in which Mary Robinson, for example, established her reputation. Indeed, one could read through this whole anthology without ever confronting the idea that sexuality has been a vexatious political issue in Irish history. Even Terence Brown’s introduction to the useful ...”

“... in a similar idiom addressed to individuals, female and male, from Margaret Tudor and the Virgin Mary to the celebrated diplomat Bernard Stewart. The dextrous harmonising of gender roles in the London poem isn’t typical of his later work, but it is entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and ...”

“... time believe and – to deform the famous formula – suspend our belief?Consider the celebrity of Mary Bell. How many times did outraged journalists cut straight from their disapproval of the money she was paid (making profit out of the most hideous of crimes) to the pleasure she was said to have taken in murdering Martin Brown and Brian Howe? Again: how ...”

“... is livid at the subjugation of Czechoslovakia and other nations to Soviet tyranny. Ambassador Lew Douglas reports to Washington that Churchill ‘believes that now is the time, promptly, to tell the Soviets that if they do not retire from Berlin and abandon Eastern Germany, we will raze their cities’ – after which, presumably, he would make a personal ...”

“... is almost as old as the game. After attending a match between Hampshire and All England in 1823, Mary Russell Mitford wrote a letter denouncing the Gentlemen and the Players for their style of play, ‘making a business of the thing’. And she loathed their dress – ‘cricketing jackets’, gloves and silk stockings – as much as modern commentators hate ...”

“... a miniature vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely ...”

“... novels, two generations later – Lady Louisa Stuart, whose Memoire of Frances Scott, Lady Douglas as she became, has been redeemed from the archives of the Border nobility, with the blessing of a former prime minister, Lord Home. The memoir appears to have been written at some point in the 1820s, and is addressed to Frances’s daughter in order to ...”

“... ordinary money, and my mother used to say that what she liked best about the place, apart from the Mary O’Hara records, was that with its bumpy single-track roads and straying donkeys it reminded her of the prewar Dales of her childhood. The only time I remember thinking that something really foreign was happening on one of these family holidays was when we ...”

“... the neo-paganism of Llewellyn Powys (brother of John Cowper), the symbolist nostalgia of Mary Butts, the Marxist version of village life offered by lesbians Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the Luddite organicism of Rolf Gardiner and the yeoman-patriotic creed of Sir Arthur Bryant (both the latter having shady pro-Nazi ...”

“... Sentiments and by Millar alone of Robertson’s History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and King James VI, Scottish authors were swamping the booksellers’ lists. Meanwhile, in England, Tobias Smollett complained that ‘Genius is lost, Learning undervalued, and Taste altogether extinguished.’ What Wedderburn meant by a ‘standard of ...”

“... even idealise it.’ In Purity and Danger (the first and still the last word on these matters), Mary Douglas writes about the Nyakyusa, who ‘venerate their own detritus and sweep rubbish onto mourners, their ritual of mourning being to welcome filth’. An obsessional culture on the other hand – Western culture – is guilty, unsettled in the ...”

“... his own creations. He treats all the real people, from the editor of the Daily Mirror to Sir Alec Douglas-Home (as he then was), with tact and courtesy. This makes life difficult for the reviewer, who cannot be so condemnatory about real people as about fictional, and to some degree hampers the author: the real people he describes may seem too predictable for ...”

“... sides of the family, he inherited the Court connections of his mother, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. At the age of 12 he was a Page of Honour to George V and in the late 1940s Private Secretary to Princess Elizabeth. From Harrow, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered the diplomatic service the year before Munich, and thoroughly approved ...”