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“... send-off. Even in our own day, Dyer has had his defenders, or at least mitigators. Nick Lloyd, like Wagner a fortyish historian at King’s College London, gave his account of Amritsar the subtitle ‘The Untold Story of One Fateful Day’ (2011). It is certainly an unfamiliar story. According to Lloyd, Dyer was ...”

“... not just on providing it but on being seen to do so. Since the 1760s, popular tribunes like John Wilkes and John Cartwright had been changing the terms of debate by demanding more press freedom and more political engagement with the people. They claimed that the public interest could be defined and defended only if ...”

“... and viewy’, a Roman Catholic who converted to Christian Science, became private secretary to Lloyd George in the First World War, and the British Ambassador in Washington in the Second; Robert Brand, thought by Jan Smuts to be ‘the most outstanding member of a very able team’ in South Africa, who became an investment banker and remained easily the ...”

“... There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April ...”

“... the campaign, as a series of media events contrived to produce a predetermined image. Even when John Major defiantly got out his own soap box, it was an artifact, a television prop, a designer soap box. It was a surrender to show business, a triumph of trivia, a debasement of debate. Never in the history of electoral conflict had so little been said by so ...”

“... laudatory. This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after his ...”

“... Of course, wartime exigencies played a part in this, producing the coalition of 1915, led by Lloyd George from 1916, and Churchill’s war ministry of 1940; but it was far from the whole story. Lloyd George, a Liberal who felt constrained by the straitjacket of party and whose radicalism did nothing to inhibit his ...”

“... Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have had no better champion since John Wayne. The nation’s youth have another icon on which to click. What makes his resuscitation the more beguiling is that New Labour’s project has been built on an emphatic rejection of Bennism. In 1981, backed by the hard Left in the unions and the ...”

“... is remembered for rounding on George Bush Sr in 1984 for patronising her, as is her 1988 successor Lloyd Bentsen – with an equally questionable excuse – for accusing Dan Quayle of comparing himself to President Kennedy. In the last of the three 2008 presidential debates it was the counter-blows that will probably be forgotten. Certainly, Barack Obama had ...”

“... later connected with the Polish, Argentinian and Turkish embassies, a secretary to Selwyn Lloyd at the FO, an intimate of leading Nazis and a Japanese agent. The manager of Claridge’s was sacked: MI5 let Grotwohl go free. Even Liddell’s main achievement, the famous ‘double-cross system’ – whereby German agents were turned into double agents ...”

“... with a single thrust of his legs. Perhaps it was because I saw the ad within 24 hours of Phyllida Lloyd’s extraordinary all-female production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, which ends its sell-out London run on 29 November, that the play struck me as an object lesson in masculinity for our times. The posturing Van Damme brought to my mind Jade Anouka’s ...”

“... was impishly rhetorical. Germans were commonly assumed to be sexual perverts, like the villain of John Buchan’s Greenmantle, the ‘huge, brutal’ Ulrich von Stumm with his ‘perverted taste for soft delicate things’. ‘Do you speak German?’ was among the most familiar graffiti in the public conveniences of Paris. Signs of Teutonic deviation at home ...”

“... example. There should be a matching of talents. Henry Kissinger should have written about, say, Lloyd George, Enoch Powell or, perhaps now, Anthony Wedgwood Benn. And Jimmy Carter, forgetting his own unhappy passage, should have turned to, say, Alec ...”

“... by his Cabinet colleagues while still the idol of the unknowing public, and therefore irremovable. Lloyd George’s War Memoirs powerfully endorsed the same picture. But, as Trevor Royle points out, it was also Lloyd George who delivered the most telling tribute to Kitchener when he compared him, memorably, to ‘one of ...”

“... But is it any more startling than to find Aneurin Bevan willing (as I have just learned from John Campbell’s Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism) to see force used in 1948 against dockers seeking to defy Cripps’s wage freeze? Even the most right-wing employer cannot risk industrial relations being made unworkable. Even the most left-wing ...”