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“... One evening in 1935, after a ‘copious’ dinner at Grillion’s, Austen Chamberlain retaliated against Winston Churchill. Course after course, Churchill had harangued his companions about British concessions in India ‘as though we were a public meeting... never letting anybody else get a word in’. Worthy of F.E. Smith’s gibe that he was the sort of gentleman who always played the game and always lost it, Austen waited for his adversary to depart before having ‘his revenge – pouring out an incessant flow of reminiscence which might be amusing were it crisp and to the point but every sentence is expanded and every trifling incident magnified, until dear good Austen begins to rank as a first-class bore – he is so insistent as to be a positive fatigue ...”

“... Christened Emma after her mother, whose later influence upon her was slight, the 11th of Sir Charles Tennant’s 15 children – three were born after he had remarried at the age of 75 – was to become famous and indeed notorious as Margot. W.E. Gladstone, allegedly more captivated by the challenge of the rhyme than by the personality of the 25-year-old woman who visited him at Hawarden in 1889, composed four stanzas of decidedly un-Homeric verse, each revolving around her name: ‘Though young and 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 ...”

“... The study of English political history has suffered a grievous loss with the death of Stephen Koss in New York on 25 October last. Though only 44, hardly more than half my age, Stephen had already established himself as an authority of the first rank on British political history in the 19th and 20th centuries ...”

“... Readers who had encountered its first volume would have known that Stephen Koss’s work on the British political press was monumental. Now it has become his monument in another, brutally unexpected sense, for Stephen Koss died suddenly soon after the completion of the second volume ...”

“... Aspinall’s notable work Politics and the Press (1949) does it for the period 1780 to 1850, and Stephen Koss pays full tribute to his predecessor. Professor Koss is one of the few American historians of the top rank writing about modern British political history (as opposed to pre-revolution English history). He is ...”

“... revealed many details of the fascinating relationship between Palmerston and the press, and that Stephen Koss in the first volume of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (1981) dealt with it critically and at length. Yet a reader turning to Miss Brown’s book and expecting it to live up to its title might well be disappointed if he had ...”

“... been the beneficiary of largesse from the London treasure-chest of the Southern Confederacy. As Stephen Koss, however, made clear in the first volume of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (1981) – to which the earlier part of this book is heavily indebted – the Standard was by no means alone in allowing itself to be compromised in ...”

“... a Fourth Estate. No one has demonstrated convincingly that such a thing ever really existed, and Stephen Koss, in his two-volume study of the political press in Britain, argued authoritatively that if it ever did, it didn’t last long. Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), who by 1896 owned both the Evening News and the Daily Mail, said: ‘I see ...”

“... different age. A historian whose work spanned political, religious and intellectual history was Stephen Koss, who died in 1984 in his mid-forties. Koss was the author of eight books on modern British history, several of them classics, yet gave the impression of being a man with several decades of scholarly vitality ...”

“... tend to underplay have to be taken into account. Asquith’s biographers, Roy Jenkins and Stephen Koss, both casually assert that Asquith ‘won’ three general elections. In our modern sense, he never won one. Campbell-Bannerman was the party leader at the Liberal landslide of 1906, and Asquith’s two elections of 1910 both produced badly hung ...”