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“... 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 ...”

“... In one sense, as the advertising claims, this is ‘the only book to tell the full story of the Jeremy Thorpe affair’, for there is no other book that tells that story. Written by three journalists from the Sunday Times, it presents the existing state of knowledge, but tidied up and reduced to order, and with some ‘investigative’ embellishments probably added ...”

“... might have read like this. Although known for his charm, wit and talent as mimic and raconteur, Jeremy Thorpe will be chiefly remembered as the deviser of much of the programme of modern British liberalism, and the architect of one of its great periods of electoral success. The grandson and son of undistinguished Conservative MPs, ...”

“... Heh, heh!’ went the judge in the Thorpe trial, Mr Justice Cantley. According to Auberon Waugh, who sat in the press benches all through the six weeks of the Old Bailey proceedings, he made a habit of it: his own jokes, the floundering of witnesses, the incredible spectacle over which he was presiding, all presented matter for a good heh ...”

“... took one of two top firsts in law, decided to become a barrister, and wrote his fellow law student Jeremy Thorpe’s tutorial essays in return for Thorpe’s help in drafting speeches for the Oxford Union – a curious prefiguration of what was to come. Carman also came top in his Bar school finals. It is an indictment ...”

“... and speak intelligently to a House which liked the man, but thought his party a joke. Then came Jeremy Thorpe, the flamboyant actor-manager, famous in private for his impersonations of Winston Churchill and in public for a taste for campaigning that seemed larger than his causes. It was Thorpe who helped his party to ...”

“... notably during the 1979 general election. This was part of his ‘oblique, crablike’ pursuit of Jeremy Thorpe, the former leader of the Liberal Party. Allegations that Thorpe had hired a hit man to dispose of his former lover Norman Scott had been cropping up since 1975, nowhere more persistently than in Private ...”

“... Grant devotes a chapter to the 1979 trial of another 20th-century chancer, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, who was tried for his role in the botched shooting of his blackmailer and former lover, Norman Scott. The press had long protected Thorpe – Grant describes him as the ‘beneficiary of a culture of ...”

“... West Country as late as 1970, as I discovered when in the general election of that year I fought Jeremy Thorpe in North Devon. By then Foot was long gone, to the valleys of South Wales, where a way with words is also appreciated. A short spell working as a clerk for a shipping company in Liverpool in the 1930s turned him into a socialist and drove him ...”

“... the bemused reader sees that among the names flashing past are those of Harold Wilson, Peter Hain, Jeremy Thorpe etc, who were supposed to be the targets of the ‘South African connection’. There the book ends, the author still asserting fiercely that justice has not been done to him. He is quite sure what ‘justice’ would be at every stage – as ...”

“... party, seldom expecting to be taken seriously and relying on a single performance by Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe or David Steel to give them whatever credibility they could earn. It was Labour that faced the real problem. Defeat for the leadership – often following a bitter row – saddled it with policies unacceptable to its own MPs and profoundly ...”

“... of being involved in a criminal conspiracy to murder Norman Scott, the friend of the Rt Hon. Jeremy Thorpe MP. It was a serious matter when a book by David Irving was read as suggesting that Captain Broome RN, the commander in 1942 of the destroyer escort of a wartime convoy taking supplies to Russia, had disobeyed orders and had been indifferent to ...”

“... National Liberal Club from its debts, hoping that he would in return be nominated for a peerage by Jeremy Thorpe. He removed most of the paintings and silverware, took a large cut from selling the library and wine cellar, brought in busloads of Scandinavian tourists, got the club to pay his children’s school fees, and finally escaped to Miami Beach with ...”

“... 11.7 million votes, Heath’s Tories got 297 seats on 11.9 million votes, and the Liberals led by Jeremy Thorpe found that their six million votes translated into 14 seats. The Liberals’ mini-revival suggested a solution to Heath’s predicament, and led him to enter into negotiations with Thorpe. The discussions ...”

“... witness, only to turn hostile at Pretoria’s bidding in order to preserve his cover. He began the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, which he leaked to the People before the 1974 election. No less amazingly, he exposed the exploitation of Hong Kong workers in order to deflect attention from similar exploitation in South Africa. Winter’s commentary on the warped ...”