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1. Alan Lascelles (left), private secretary to successive monarchs, did not reveal his contempt for the Prince of Wales (Edward VIII, here with arms crossed), for many years.

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2. Beatrice Webb could have married Joseph Chamberlain instead of Sidney Webb – with interesting consequences for the Labour Party.

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3. ‘Tom, great Tom, thinks [Ulysses] on a par with War and Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me.’ Virginia Woolf had a higher opinion of T. S. Eliot, left, than of James Joyce.

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4. Frances Stevenson (far left) charted the long relationship with David Lloyd George (in civvies). The child is Jennifer, their daughter, in the early 1930s.

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5. Trade union leader and diarist, Walter Citrine (top right, in scarf) with George Lansbury on the National Demonstration on Unemployment, Hyde Park, London, 1933.

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6. Shirley and John Catlin on holiday, 1932, with their mother, Vera Brittain.

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7. The first general manager and director general of the BBC, John Reith, (top left) personally supervised many broadcasts in the pre-war years.

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8. At the crease in the actresses v authors cricket match, 1938, a relaxed J. B. Priestley.

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9. Cecil Beaton, himself captured on film, just before he began his work as a Second World War photographer.

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10. Before the war, Benjamin Britten moved to the US with Peter Pears, but returned disillusioned. ‘To be a liberal is dangerous – to be a communist is fatal.’

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11. Private secretary, trustee and executor to Winston Churchill, John ‘Jock’ Colville is pictured with Clemmie Churchill at Chequers.

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12. A passionate campaigner for Zionism, Blanche ‘Baffy’ Dugdale, the niece of Balfour, is photographed visiting Jerusalem 1944.

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13. ‘Housewife, 49’ was revealed to be Nella Last, a resident of the shipyard town, Barrow-in-Furness, pictured here with one of her sons, Cliff.

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14. ‘I do not like the job and I do not think the arrangement can last,’ wrote Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), on being appointed Churchill’s doctor in May 1940.

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15. Joyce Grenfell enchanted servicemen across the globe (pictured here in London 1944) when she and pianist Viola Tunnard joined the Entertainments National Service Association for the war.

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16. Malcolm Muggeridge in Moscow in 1959, twenty-seven years after he first visited the Soviet Union and found the scales falling from his eyes.

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17. Cricket bats: Ted Dexter (left), captain of England, and Frank Worrell (right), captain of the West Indies, flanking Harold Macmillan at Chequers, September 1963: Macmillan was to resign shortly after (due to events, not cricket).

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18/19/20. Iconoclasts of post-war liberalism: Kenneth Tynan, (top); Joe Orton, (bottom left); Jimmy Boyle (bottom right), sculptor, diarist, writer, reformed criminal.

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21. Violet Bonham Carter, keeper of the Liberal flame in the Thirties and Forties with her son-in-law, Jo Grimond, the MP for Orkney and Shetland. Grimond led the Liberals 1956–67.

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22. Barbara Castle, in typical hands-on approach to politics (with a little help from the skipper), on board Royal Daffodil II, 1967.

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23. ‘Lilibet’ and dogs with Louis Mountbatten, at Royal Windsor Horse Show, May 1973.

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24. Tony Benn (right), joked that the ‘e’ in Concorde stood for England, Ecosse, excellence and extravagance.

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25. Peter Hall taking over from Sir Laurence Olivier, at the newly-built National Theatre, on the south bank of the Thames, 1973.

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26. Horse racing and journalism brought together the flamboyant Woodrow Wyatt, once a Labour MP, with royalty, politicians and the Murdoch family.

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27. Jane and Alan Clark being taken walkies by their Rottweilers, two of the many pets they owned, Saltwood, 1994.

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28. Another Labour horse-racing enthusiast – Foreign Secretary Robin Cook – looking up the form with John McCririck of Channel 4.

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29. Deborah Bull, principal ballerina for The Royal Ballet – making it look so easy.

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30. Sunderland South, always the first constituency to declare on Election night, with its MP from 1987 to 2010, Chris Mullin.

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31. Oona King, Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, campaigning at Columbia Road Flower market for the last time in 2005.