Robert Oakeshott

Surprisingly (but maybe not to those who knew him well) it was the Duke of Devonshire who, having been appointed colonial secretary in Bonar Law’s government, issued a White Paper in 1923 about the paramountcy of African interests in the then colony of Kenya: Primarily Kenya is an African territory and HMG thinks it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.

Woodruff, you have not come to Oxford to take examinations, you have come to learn. The whole purpose of Oxford is learning.Buoyed up by the instant success of the first volume of his autobiography, William Woodruff and his English publishers have understandably decided to cash in on the Nab End brand in this, the second. As many readers will remember, The Road to Nab End - about an unusually run-down, and miserably poor neighbourhood in Blackburn - was immediately recognised as a classic account of working-class family life between the wars in what was then a Lancashire cotton town. The author had been born in 1916. The first volume took his story down to 1933. It left him in the cab of a friendly lorry-driver, being driven south from Lancashire into Cheshire and heading for London.