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“... remembered and admired for his pertinacity and skill, if for nothing else. But he has written with Ian Ridley an exceptionally interesting autobiography. Sporting autobiography is a difficult genre. Many are written but few survive. They are too often catalogues of games lost and won, or merely self-congratulatory. And they only rarely connect to the ...”

“... the mark – or better still, Conservative Party Election Manifesto. Which brings me to Nicholas Ridley’s contribution to the same debate. Like Mr Anderson, he was a devotee of Mrs Thatcher. But he hasn’t found it quite so easy to switch his loyalties to her successor. He continues to smoulder with hatred for the ‘lesser’ people in the ‘ruthless ...”

“... the Tory Party. A huge flow of paper about Hamilton and his paymaster/co-plaintiff, the lobbyist Ian Greer, emerged for the first time. The decisive revelation was a tape-recorded conversation between Hamilton and the First Secretary to the Treasury, Michael Heseltine, in which Hamilton denied any ‘financial relationship’ with ...”

“... managers who failed to achieve this target would be sacked. The report, drafted by the MP Nicholas Ridley, recognised that the pressures to economise would inevitably threaten management-union conflict. In sectors where a Conservative government could not contemplate the political or economic costs of such conflict, ‘return on capital figures should be ...”

“... to see the United States embarking on a military journey without maps. ‘Guilty but Insane’ was Ian Gilmour’s heading for his Spectator review of Michael Foot and Mervyn Jones, whose Suez book Guilty Men 1956 is still one of the best accounts of the collusion. The Spectator has often made trouble for the Tory leadership, with Iain Macleod’s bean-spiller ...”

“... nature of the infection was understood, and led to ‘nimbying’ (the verbal felicity of Nicholas Ridley, and his personal commitment to the attitude, have given us this acronym for the ‘not in my backyard’ syndrome). Linda Bryder shows how a Welsh holiday village was able in the 20th century to resist having a sanatorium set up near its water ...”

“... with us, above all the hymns of the Victorian and what one might call the long Edwardian age. Ian Bradley’s study is fascinating, once past a misguided Introduction, which develops a long comparison between Victorian hymns and modern soap-operas that seems to embarrass Bradley himself halfway through. He is a mine of information not only on the ...”

“... later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The ...”

“... the myths and rituals of the British state, but a blasé indifference to the impact of policy. As Ian Jack pointed out in these pages last year (15 June 2017), the expat perspective seems to play an important role in the psychology of Brexit. Hannan and Carswell both had expatriate childhoods. Astute observers, such as the writer Gary Younge, have argued that ...”

“... is always driving him to it and making him “follow his art”,’ Ursula Ridley noted glumly, ‘whereas really he can’t paint at all.’ It was one of Lehmann’s difficulties with love that she was such a driving force, far too big, physically and mentally, to fit into the glass slipper femininity she admired. Like that other ...”

“... from the inside who had been cast aside by Thatcher – Mark Carlisle, Norman St John Stevas, Sir Ian Gilmour – Prior was not made of the stuff to fight the leader of his own party. A mild, bumbling man, he preferred not to step out of line. Michael Heseltine was different. Rich, abrasive and ambitious, Heseltine was fed up with Thatcher and her schoolmarm ...”

“... the cables buried beneath the unsuspecting ground. Dick File’s Weather Watch, with foreword by Ian McCaskill (who, according to Bill Giles, broadcasts in his bare feet), is a no-nonsense trot in teasingly accessible segments through the excitements of the British weather: carbon dioxide ‘sinks’, Chaos Theory, incentives for reducing emissions. The book ...”

“... consumer-friendly industry. In his 1978 party report on the nationalised industries, Nicholas Ridley had deplored the fact that certain unions could hold the Government to ransom by striking or threatening to strike. The outstanding example, of course, was Heath’s acceptance in 1974 of a 35 per cent pay increase for the miners after their strike had ...”

“... tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German feeling; and Mrs Edwina Currie (‘most of the egg production in this country is, sadly, now infected with salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David ...”

“... in the Observer, 2 May 1982, that Britain ‘has established a good title’. Professor Ian Brownlie, however (Principles of Public International Law, third edition, 1979), shows hardly any faith in this principle at all. He concludes his last paragraph ‘Acquisitive prescription: an epitaph’: ‘one may doubt whether there is any role in the law ...”