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“... of a reigning monarch. The market is there – several markets indeed, and the name of Lady Longford is an indication that we are concerned with the upper end. She is not Crawfie – not so well informed on some matters perhaps, but better informed on many more. Moreover, she has come to us with the guarantees afforded by a biography of Queen ...”

“... the shade of Peter Cook, intoning regretfully how he ‘never had the reading for the spying’.) Lord Kim, on the other hand, might just about have served, given the fact that H. St John Philby got himself called everything from sahib to tuan all across the British Empire’s eastern division, and given the obsession of all these authors with the English ...”

“... Establishment is that she is reputedly flirting with Roman Catholicism. This inspires those like Lord Rees-Mogg to hope that the hapless Diana may finally shatter the Act of Settlement of 1701 which banned Catholic monarchs from inheriting this kingdom, and heirs to the throne from marrying Catholics. After all, even if she divorces her husband, she will ...”

“... for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a wife to do. Elizabeth Longford, in her introduction, describes this as a characteristic blend of ‘cold calculation and sensitive consideration’. The book consists of extracts from Curzon’s Tales of Travel, Russia in Central Asia and Leaves from a Viceroy’s Notebook (a title to ...”

“... allowed to say so. Furbank seems to be falling here into the same trap, as he calls it, as Lady Longford did in a radio interview which he quotes from. Interviewer: Would it be right to say you come from a comfortable middle-class family? Lady Longford Upper middle class ... That was what we were told. I never knew ...”

“... he refused to publish his contributions – and then in 1911 paid £5000 to take the Observer off Lord Northcliffe's hands, Northcliffe having fallen out with the paper’s bright-spark editor, James Louis Garvin, over the question of imperial trade preference. Buying the Observer had really been the idea of William Waldorf’s son, also called Waldorf (the ...”

“... of it. Carrick-on-Shannon is (perhaps) a short drive away; in the other direction you’ll get to Longford in a while. If you don’t try to make sense of it, the barely mentioned place-names can only remind you how lost you are. It appears to be a novel of place. The events are quiet and agricultural: a funeral, a wedding, a harvest. The central characters ...”

“... the name. (It was Gabriel Carritt, whose actual tastes impelled him towards the future Countess of Longford.) Politically, his Thirties seem to have fitted a conventional anti-Fascist and moralistic description. I say ‘seem’ because Howard gives us some reason to think that Crossman had a furtive admiration for the Nazis, acquired during his sojourn in ...”

“... as a good writer, and established a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for ...”

“... and this shows in his account of a House of Commons debate where Tim Healy, the nationalist MP for Longford, attacked that pernicious organ, the London Times, for its publication of forged letters in the notorious ‘Parnellism and Crime’ series. Healy, Yeats tells Tynan, made a rugged passionate speech the most human thing I heard, I missed Dillon ...”

“... undertow. Among de Valera’s greatest supporters was Robert Briscoe, a Jew who later became Lord Mayor of Dublin (as did his son Ben Briscoe), but he was never a minister in any Fianna Fáil government because of what Keogh calls ‘an undercurrent of hostility towards Jews in the country which even de Valera disappointingly adjudged better left ...”

“... as the ‘Laughing Cavalier’, more famous than any other picture by him. The contest between Lord Hertford and Baron James de Rothschild to buy it at the Pourtalès sale in 1865 made it even more so. But it is sobering to realise that the Dead Orlando, a picture of the youthful warrior in black silk, lying dead surrounded by skulls, was quite as famous ...”

“... by events he could neither control nor comprehend. And Philip Ziegler’s official life of Lord Mountbatten suggested that the royal family’s ‘beloved Uncle Dickie’ was an interfering manipulator of unscrupulous methods, and a shameless adventurer of colossal and inordinate vanity. With so much daylight now being let in, it is hardly surprising ...”

“... would sometimes look in on his way home for a final pipe, and more than once the burly shape of Lord Macaulay was known to grace the gathering’) or Myles na gCopaleen (‘Diaghilev I knew and liked, a strange genius of a man if ever there was one. But Fokine was the daddy of them all, and an exemplary family man among a crew of roués’). These ...”

“... weren’t quite sure what it meant. The journalist Maureen Cleave wrote to Keane that the earl of Longford, Thomas Pakenham (Anglo-Irish historian and brother of Antonia Fraser), ‘is dying to meet you. He has been reading all your old novels under the impression that you are J.G. Farrell’s mother. In any case he thinks they are very good.’ She was not ...”