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“... though 20th-century Conservatives have included a few Whiggish eccentrics. The Liberal Party of David Steel bears little resemblance to it, except in some residual link with religious dissent and the geographical periphery. The old-style Labour Party inherited some Whig nostrums, especially in foreign policy and constitutional matters. The Tory Party, on ...”

“... the case of Britain, where nothing of that sort has been heard of for ages, unless it was Cecil King’s attempt in 1976 to interest some officers at a Sandhurst dinner to ‘stand for Britain’ against Harold Wilson and the political class generally. His reception was so frosty that he went home early. Civil-military relations in Britain are no ...”

“... Comintern’ comes in for further treatment, this time in a long autobiographical essay by Robert Cecil. Perhaps the chief novelty is the persistent implication that the writer, academic and MP, Goronwy Rees, may have been active in the Soviet cause over a considerable period of years. If so, it certainly lends a new twist to one’s reading of the ...”

“... that the biography’s publishers, who already include Constant’s Music Ho! and his mentor Cecil Gray’s Musical Chairs on their list (perhaps they are planning to add Gray’s Survey of Contemporary Music or Bernard Van Dieren’s Down Among the Dead Men), felt that an investment in the Lambert field ought to be consolidated. Nevertheless, the ...”

“... that has been squandered, with nothing to show for it when the oil runs out. In a candid moment, Cecil Parkinson, the Energy Secretary, admitted that most of it has gone on paying the bills of unemployment. The Eighties under Thatcher are the decade, not of the economic miracle, but of the great missed opportunity. For all their talk of resolution and of ...”

“... torturers and executioners of the Junta were still hard at work in August 1980 when the immaculate Cecil Parkinson visited Videla in Buenos Aires. As John Simpson and Jana Bennett of the British Broadcasting Corporation relate in their excellently-researched but somewhat inhibited book, the one-time Secretary for Trade and Industry had brought two messages for ...”

“... names for characters nicely illustrates. The novels are full of heroines called Cecil, Alix, Julian, Denham, Rome or Barbary, as if the author were trying to neutralise their femininity, and (it is implied) give them a sort of head start in the reader’s sympathies. In her last, best and best-known book, The Towers of Trebizond, this ...”

“... called Miqbal, Abdullah, Hana and Najiba were naming their children Gladys, George, Pauline and David (as well as the all-American ‘Junior’). Yet of all the Shadid and Samara descendants only Anthony felt compelled to return to Marjayoun. Rooting himself in the soil of his family history, he hoped, would compensate for the peripatetic life of the ...”

“... place are four Meko 140 frigates and four Meko 360 destroyers powered by Rolls-Royce engines, David Brown gearboxes and Decca navigation equipment: all made by us, though ordered before April 1982 after Cecil Parkinson, in his incarnation as Minister of State at the Board of Trade, had gone to Buenos Aires and eulogised ...”

“... her he had consulted a priest before consenting to act with her turned the knife in a deep wound. Cecil Beaton saw Marilyn as ‘a dreaming somnambule, a composite of Alice in Wonderland, Trilby and a Minsky artist’. Barbara Hutton, with whom he often stayed at her Tangiers palace, seemed to him ‘a little Byzantine empress-doll’. What he saw behind the ...”

“... CND, his contempt for the New English Bible, his delight in nude bathing, and his belief that if David Owen had stayed in the Labour Party he would have become its leader. All his columns were eagerly followed, but one series excited particular attention. He reported that his wife, the Hungarian historian Eva Haraszti, was in hospital, and chronicled the ...”

“... the Communist Party as a career move: ‘You will meet big people.’ By the end of that year, David Platt, the Daily Worker’s movie reviewer (a witness frequently summoned by Hoberman for counterpoint), announced that ‘never before in the history of the screen have there been so many forward-looking people in positions of responsibility as in ...”

“... by or about the group. Clive Bell went to the Paris exhibitions, there were stories by David Garnett, features on Duncan Grant, and Woolf wrote five pieces, including one about Sir Walter Raleigh. Vogue still owed something to the society magazine that was the earliest incarnation of the American edition, and the first frontispiece went to Eileen ...”

“... between Bush and Thatcher. When Thatcher sacked Channon a few decent months later, she appointed Cecil Parkinson in his place. Shaken by the grief of the Lockerbie victims’ families, Parkinson promised them a full public inquiry. Alas, when he put the idea to the Prime Minister she slapped him down at once. There was no judicial or public inquiry with full ...”

“... Can historical biography still be written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him ...”