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“... ultimately be judged and defined by what he does.’ A journalist who may be closer to events, Peter Snowdon ends his book on a more equivocal note: ‘If the last four and a half years have been testing for Cameron’s Conservative Party,’ he writes, ‘the next few will be far harder, whether the party wins or loses.’ Not that ...”

“... of the announcement: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.’ For the older generation, Princess Margaret was the unlucky princess. She was our Diana: capricious, passionate, vindictive, doomed to fall in love with rotters, the breakaway royal who hung out with actors and rogues and who was frozen out by ...”

“... at the Old Bailey on 8 May 1979. The main prosecution witnesses, Norman Scott, the ex-Liberal MP Peter Bessell and the dog-slaying Newton, all admitted that they had been great liars in the past but said that they were now telling the truth. Some of them, it turned out, stood to make far more money on their newspaper stories if their evidence secured a ...”

“... having discovered a talent for making likenesses. The Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Archbishop Makarios and Adolf Eichmann all sat for portraits. He was an invitee at all the fashionable parties, and a man who specialised in providing fun for his friends. Keeler met him when she was a showgirl and moved into his flat, though they never ...”

“... taken into shrines – places as sacred to lovers of the industrial sublime as Gordale Scar or Snowdon are to lovers of the Burkean kind. Bainbridge, uncomprehending of or depressed by new townscapes, gives few marks for the cars, television sets, bathrooms and freezers, public buildings and state services, which are what, for better or worse, we bought ...”

“... Brazilian Adventure?’ the young travelogue aspirant ventured to ask, to be crisply told that Peter Fleming’s book had sold as an adventure, not as a book about Brazil. Fleming’s two prewar travel books, the Brazilian one and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively took to heart the advice of ...”

“... Board, to call when the taps had finally run dry. Often, they gave them the number of poor Lord Snowdon. Sometimes this was done out of sheer unpleasantness, but the night it went wrong it was done for pettier motives. Nona Summers, a society hostess, was that evening minding her own business in her own nice home in the company of Jack Nicholson and three ...”

“... the queen’s authority elsewhere – as chancellor of the University of Oxford, ranger of Snowdon Forest, or high steward of Windsor, Bristol, Reading, Abingdon, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Wallingford, Tewkesbury and St Albans – that he didn’t manage to visit Kenilworth once during the first three years he owned it. Despite the elaborate ...”

“... wet rope on the Embankment when she won the Booker (‘Jane Bown . . . tells me that when Lord Snowdon came to photograph Anita B. he pinned her at the back with clothes pegs and she was justifiably upset’). Then there were the judgments of critics. She was compared, inevitably, with Barbara Pym and Beryl Bainbridge (the latter she thought ‘a good ...”

“... press, but the press talked about her, and after her scandalous romance with the divorced Captain Peter Townsend they talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official events. By ...”