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“... as with Churchill, Edward’s reputation survived a long period of dotage. In the 19th century, as Ian Mortimer shows in the introduction to his new biography, Victorian rectitude and a preoccupation with constitutional history caused feelings about Edward to change. Bishop Stubbs, ‘peering down on the Middle Ages from the twin heights of an episcopal ...”

“... of fascinating problems, mostly unsolved’, they have been chary of taking up this challenge. Ian Mortimer’s The Fears of Henry IV fills an important gap, and if it does not solve all the problems it certainly tackles most of them. In the years before 1397, Henry won a large reputation: as his father’s dutiful son, as a champion of chivalry and a ...”

“... with an answering machine. Grylls was hooked at once. He recommended the legendary lobbyist Ian Greer, who was approached by the hoaxers and, like Grylls, immediately hoodwinked. Lured to the bogus Park Lane offices Greer and his associates were filmed as they boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even ...”

“... needed, since Annan’s own powers of expression were wooden to say the least. This pair, Edward Mortimer and Nader Mousavizadeh, came from the Financial Times and the New Republic respectively, two publications whose political profiles need little specification. Not surprisingly, Annan’s various pronouncements, applauded for their eloquence by like-minded ...”

“... important. ‘No group is any better than its drummer,’ the Rolling Stones’ late piano player Ian Stewart tells A.E. Hotchner. ‘Drummers are the heart of a group,’ confirms Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience: ‘a good one is worth his weight in gold.’ And here is the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock on drummer Paul Cook: ‘that steady rhythm ...”

“... of whom was ever dusted off or taken down. Nor did its unconvincing blank verse impress Raymond Mortimer or even Philip Larkin, who warned Murray his review would not be ‘a rave’. Others simply parodied Betjeman’s more familiar tum-ti-tum verses, which, as the Sunday Express showed, was all too easy: Have you read the latest Betjeman? But, my ...”

“... dismissed the Fu Manchu tales as ‘absolute rubbish, penny dreadfuls in hard covers’, but John Mortimer was happy to include the fiend with ‘a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan’ in his Oxford Book of Villains. On the cover of Volume Two of this Omnibus a voice from Time Out exclaims: ‘These long-awaited reprints make my heart sing.’ So ...”

“... with the pre-Portnoy, and much more reserved, My friend says it’s bulletproof by Penelope Mortimer. But Tit for Tat has none of Roth’s or Jong’s jollity – the secrets are dirtier and much more frightening. Bargate’s narrative tone is traumatised and post-operative. What literary flourishes she offers are flattened by the awful obsession with ...”

“... personality covers a multitude of offences’, and this remained the case throughout his life. Ian Collins’s engagingly partisan biography conveys qualities not easily evoked, the appeal of a character whose default mode was happiness and who, if he had a tendency to ‘put his own interests first’ and to be ‘unreliable in an emergency’, had a care ...”

“... published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I have an open mind about queer-bashing,’ Waugh’s diary reflected, ‘from one point of view it seems rather cruel ...”

“... gamely but irrelevantly does, is like poring for clues over the crabbed, cretinous scrawl of Ian Brady. Such a man needs scope. Scope! And scope is what, by relentless fawning on impressionable creatures, Henry finally got. It’s a tale well worth the telling. When the American élite divided over the war in Vietnam, Kissinger was in a quandary. He ...”

“... Second World War which turned him from a reviewer into a critic. New books were scarce, so Raymond Mortimer, the Statesman’s literary editor, set Pritchett to filling the ‘Books in General’ slot with essays on classic authors, French and Russian as well as English. Perhaps we tend now to romanticise the circumstances in which these essays were originally ...”

“... presence. On another occasion, Maugham ‘gave him an icy stare’ as Ann Fleming – wife of Ian – chastised him ‘by banging a serving spoon on his offensively prominent ear trumpet’. Christopher Isherwood, on the other hand, found that Maugham’s stammer ‘somehow made you feel that you were stammering, not he’. Raymond ...”

“... to Spenser Junior in the play have failed to accept and understand that Edward preferred men. Mortimer Senior, in a speech in the play, seems to believe that Edward’s relationship with Gaveston was in a long tradition, but that he would grow out of it: And seeing his mind so dotes on Gaveston, Let him without controlment have his will. The mightiest ...”

“... a process which, if properly undertaken, is slow, painstaking and, more often than not, dull. Sir Mortimer Wheeler probably started the rot and then there was Glyn Daniel and his bow ties and today it’s Tony Robinson capering about professing huge excitement because of the uncovering of the (entirely predictable) foundations of a Benedictine priory at ...”