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“... the Telegraph). Here again, though, nature totally outstripped art. Could any mere novelist – Anthony Trollope, Hugh Walpole, even Ernest Raymond – conceivably have come up with a plot in which a highly-regarded, if disappointed, Oxford don first mixes an explosive cocktail to be drunk by his own Church, on being taxed with it denies all responsibility ...”

“... Evening newspapers are an endangered species. When I started out as a journalist in 1958, there were not only three in London but three in New York as well. Today each of these cities can boast just one, with Washington, since the death of the Washington Star in 1981, possessing none at all. It is, therefore, a bold and defiant moment to produce an elaborate house history of one of the few survivors of a declining newspaper art-form – at least in the English-speaking world ...”

“... Jeremy Thorpe has long been the non-person of modern British politics. Never mind that 25 years ago he attained for the then stand-alone Liberal Party more votes (over six million) than Paddy Ashdown achieved for the by now merged Liberal Democrats (five and a quarter million) at the last general election. Discretion, if not sheer political cowardice, decreed that his faintly saturnine presence should be air-brushed out of any contemporary history of Britain’s third party ...”

“... We asked for bread, and you gave us a stone’: the cry that rang out from the gallery of Church House, Westminster, after one of the earliest debates over women’s ordination nearly twenty years ago demonstrates that even in Church politics you should never despair. The mills of God may grind slowly but they grind exceeding sure, or so those who fought for so long for the introduction of women priests into the poor old battered ecclesia anglicana may now feel entitled to claim ...”

“... The late James Cameron always liked to claim that the only male company in which he felt at home was that of his fellow journalists. They offered him, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘the conversational shorthand of completely common understanding’. Nor was his in any way an exceptional reaction. The existence across the world of various favoured journalistic watering-holes – sometimes grandly known as Press Clubs, more usually simply hotel bars with squatters’ rights established – is one proof of that ...”

“... The most revealing moment at the recent meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod occurred during an impromptu speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr Robert Runcie was speaking against an amendment urging the Church to delay re-submitting its Clergy (Ordination) Measure to Parliament until ‘after the next Parliamentary General Election ...”

“... The first time I became anything more than routinely conscious of the existence of that faintly ludicrous figure, the Sultan of Brunei, was in December 1985. Until around then – as Lord Chalfont obligingly mentions in the course of a work that can otherwise only be compared with The Lives of the Saints – the general view (endorsed not only by a public opinion poll but by me as well) was that the Sultan’s kingdom was ‘somewhere in the Middle East’, possibly even ‘one of the Gulf Emirates ...”

“... the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians. His first article had been an analysis of the ...”

“... transition from the passive to the active mood in British politics and government mentioned above. Anthony Howard’s Rab is the first fully-documented life of the man who on three separate occasions just missed becoming Conservative prime minister, and for that reason alone would be of peculiar interest. But even without the premiership R.A. Butler’s ...”

“... a ‘regressive schizoid phenomenon’. The book undoubtedly scored a few (underhand) hits and Anthony Howard called it a ‘revolutionary’ work. In fact, Private Member was pretty modest by comparison with what we have here. ‘Live dangerously,’ an inauspicious epigraph from Nietzsche insists: ‘Send your ships into uncharted seas! Be robbers ...”

“... till January 1953. I had heard of Beckett, though not much. He had been sighted and cited by Anthony Hartley – in the Spectator, I suppose; Hartley had a great nose and a fine ear for things French, and he let the British in on his finds – I can’t think that there is anyone around today who does this work so well. Waiting for Godot, as the world ...”

“... unionist for the shocking crime of opposing the Government of Malawi, the prosecution was led by Anthony Beveridge QC and masterminded by the solicitor Anthony Nich-Smith, both time-honoured and faithful lawyers for Lonrho. As soon as a Scotland Yard detective finished his report after an inquiry into Lonrho, Rowland ...”

“... is just the sort of thing he needed to know. An interesting case of the discriminating guest is Anthony Howard, then editor of the New Statesman, who accepted an invitation to dinner, but said he would have turned down the Chilean, Argentinian or South African (but not Israeli) Embassies. Nor does Radji get much help from the other luminaries, many of ...”

“... at the Hirsel provides an interesting clue to the mystery of his rise to power. In December 1962 Anthony Howard wrote a piece for the New Statesman under the provocative heading ‘Mr Home and Mr Hogg?’ It was already apparent that legislative change was in the offing, opening the way for the second Viscount Stansgate to begin the spectacular exercise ...”

“... particularly well and the best course is surely to acknowledge this, as in the life of Butler by Anthony Howard and that of Macmillan by Alistair Horne. The alternative strategy is that adopted by Rhodes James on Eden: to defend his hero on every conceivable count, from geopolitical insight (Eden alone discerned the scale of the Soviet menace) to ...”