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“... back to his new wife, Wanda, when she came in, with tears running down his face. This is how D.R. Thorpe tells the story, eloquently and elegantly, as he does everything in this exemplary biography, which complements if it does not entirely supplant Alistair Horne’s two-volume official Life; Horne is better on the military, ...”

“... to earn him the title of ‘worst prime minister of the 20th century’. One of the merits of D.R. Thorpe’s new biography is that it enables one to sympathise with Eden’s own verdict (after Horace Walpole): ‘Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.’ Eden was a man only too able to feel, trying hard to be someone ...”

“... him as nothing more than a professional politician out of the chorus line in Iolanthe. D.R. Thorpe’s reference at one point in this engaging new biography to ‘the insouciant calm under pressure that 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 ...”

“... himself as ‘a Welsh country solicitor’? One of the aspects of Lloyd’s career which D.R. Thorpe’s very useful biography brings out is the way that it was rooted not in Conservatism but in Lloyd George Liberalism. It was when Lloyd George’s serious bid for power had failed after 1931, and he found himself reduced to a Parliamentary group of only ...”