whippersnapper

buccaneer.

To have tried to write a full-length book about a medium-grade even if inherently interesting subject, say William Harcourt or John Morley, both of whom could do with reappraisals, would be the equivalent of trying to get excited, after a Himalayan expedition, by an amble up Snowdon.

paucity

meretricious

sympathise with all your extravagances – even more than you do with mine – it seems just as suicidal to me when you spend £200 on a ball dress as it does to you when I purchase a new polo pony for £100. And yet I feel that you ought to have the dress and I the polo pony. The pinch of the whole matter is that we are damned poor.30

none of the Marlboroughs had shown either morals or principles.

Out of these pressures Churchill evolved two firm rules which he followed faithfully for the rest of his life. The first was that expenditure should be determined by needs (generously interpreted) rather than by resources. He stood the famous maxim of Dickens’s Mr Micawber on its head. Second, he decided that when the gap between income and

And Lord Randolph’s elder brother was, in the words of an eminent modern historian, ‘one of the most disreputable men ever to have debased the highest rank in the British peerage’.1 He appropriately bore the name of Blandford, the title of the Marlborough heir, for most of his relatively short life, during which he was expelled from Eton, got