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“... of the language of the people they affected to rule, was his answer, and Duggan’s stepfather was Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, so perhaps he knew what he was talking about. Arthur and Badon creep into the end of Duggan’s novel sequence, though the ‘siege’ is presented as less than decisive. For these and other British writers, the image of Arthur ...”

“... A building inhabited by George Nathaniel Curzon became a building with a history – one written by himself. Envisaging his own presence there as the latest episode in a colourful pageant of stirring deeds and raw emotions, he wanted that pageant to be properly chronicled. Sitting in Government House, Calcutta, he reflected, ‘If these stones could speak, what a tale they might tell’ – and told it for them in a book that he saw as his literary monument, to be read hundreds of years after his death ...”

“... were reported to have crossed the frontier and carried off Nepali yaks): in fact, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, was worried about Russian influence in Tibet. Younghusband, keen for action, recommended that ‘the power of the monks . . . be so far broken as to prevent them any longer selfishly obstructing the prosperity both of Tibet and of ...”

“... responsible had no wish to recall it. After the publication of a damning official report in 1917, Lord Curzon, a member of the war cabinet, suggested that ‘a more shocking exposure of official blundering and incompetence has not in my opinion been made, at any rate since the Crimean War.’ The intervention began on a small scale in 1914, initially ...”

“... apiece, and most Cabinet Ministers could usually count on at least two – especially if, like Lord Randolph Churchill, their reputation was safer in their son’s hands than in their own. Although Lytton Strachey assailed such pious pomposity by showing that the slenderest of books could sometimes be the weightiest, and that eminence was not necessarily ...”

“... was the FO’s initial response; it was ‘the Gibraltar of the Hindu Kush,’ announced Lord Rosebery), and after a brief war scare the Russians apologised. But Younghusband had committed the great sin of creating a public embarrassment for the British Government, and had made matters worse by too insistent demands for retaliation. Suddenly ...”

“... America has not, and this may account for some of the undoubted blunders in postwar Iraq. Lord Cromer, born Evelyn Baring, came from that class. With Lords Curzon and Milner, he was one of the trio of great imperial proconsuls in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He has always seemed the dullest of ...”

“... the allegation that he had conducted an injudicious love-affair with a boy called George Nathaniel Curzon, later to be Viceroy of India. Ian Anstruther in his new biography aims to set the record straight in this regard – although not, it may be said at once, at the expense of a full account of O.B.’s career as a teacher of near-genius and a far-sighted ...”

“... achievements were voluminous, but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase. A word, too, should be said for his life of his father, Lord Carnock, which he regarded as his best achievement. He wrote with care and in an ...”

“... understood to be, wholly novel: ‘foreign to the Spirit of our people ... too Latin’, thought Lord Curzon. In short, the Cenotaph was built not because of the strength of tradition but because of its failure in the aftermath of 1914-18. Thiepval and the Vietnam Memorial are a slightly different story. The architectural vocabulary of the former is ...”

“... fairway, the author of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was already melting under the impact of A.J.B. Lord Vansittart, a junior at the Foreign Office when Balfour was foreign secretary, confessed that he found it ‘hopeless to avoid devotion’. The secret of Balfour’s charm was his nonchalance. Staying cool seemed to be his only rule. Vansittart ...”

“... sexual taboos leads him to argue that racial feeling among Europeans attained it apogee during Curzon’s viceroyalty (1898-1905). This is odd, for nothing could exceed the mood of racial savagery that overtook British and even American opinion during the Mutiny outbreak of 1857. But this was seen as the crude and brutal assertion of superiority by ...”

“... though fair, who can hold such a cargo/Of all the good qualities going as Margot?’ George Curzon, a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ... you never will beat’ the wit of dear Margot. (‘Emma’, presumably, would have posed a dilemma for both of them.) Gladstone ...”

“... volumes of diaries, which his son eventually entrusted to John Vincent for editing ‘That Lord Crawford was a man of distinction was agreed by all,’ attests Vincent, who seems unduly impressed by royal letters of condolence. Nevertheless, Vincent admits to finding it slightly difficult ‘to convey something of his quality’, which alternately ...”

“... from the resident in Lucknow, Colonel John Low, and from the governor-general in Calcutta, Lord William Bentinck, to dispatch the offerings: two elephants, two superb horses with jewelled harnesses, sundry necklaces, bracelets and Indian manuscripts galore, together with a bedstead studded with diamonds and pearls, and an enormous oil painting (9'6" by ...”