'Frederic, I am going to tell you something now that you will remember for the rest of your life. The King is dead.'
'I said, "Oh, papa, who will be King now?" and my father said, "We are not going to have a king. We are going to have a queen."
' I said, "So, it has come to that." '
I met Harold Macmillan who met Mark Twain and was friends with Conrad, Kipling and Hardy.
I used to see each day, when I worked at the House of Lords, Lord Ampthill who had been the Russell baby, whose mother had been a virgin when he was conceived with a partially intact hymen. His father had used 'Hunnish practices' to inseminate her. The court reports provided sex education to a generation of young readers and resulted in the Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act 1926 which prevented reporting of indecent details of divorce proceedings.
I used to pass a Tramp asleep on a leather bench behind the throne who was the fourth Earl Russell. His father Bertrand Russell knew the first earl who as Lord John Russell was Prime Minister and who as a young man met Napoleon. Four removes from me is not especially impressive.
At the next table to me in the United Oxford and Cambridge Universities Club, when I was an undergraduate member, I heard the father of the club, Victor Hill, saying that Rupert Brooke and he chased the same girl at Cambridge.
I remember when I was 8 or 9 a man telling my mother that as a small boy he had watched Chinese immigrants on their way to be deported and being told it was because of the Boxer Rising. I already knew about the Boxer Rising, which happened in 1900, and was surprised because he did not look nearly old enough.
My Auntie Rose was told as a little girl in the First World War that our men were fighting in Belgium and imagined that they were trading fisticuffs.
My grandfather in whose house I grow up was at the Somme and after 1945 worked in the War Office where his boss was called Mr Burgess. One day Mr Burgess did not come tot he office and they discovered that he had defected to Moscow.