So cross that he postponed his bath...

I'm greatly enjoying Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, finding it rather more agreeable reading than Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Reading about the egregious press baron Lord Northcliffe brought home to me what a very Northcliffean organ his creation, the Daily Mail, still is – or at least was when I served my 22 years in Northcliffe House – and how Northcliffean the management style is/was. But I'll say no more (and Paul Dacre was always very nice to me). I'm now reading about the languid aristocrat Arthur Balfour, Cambridge 'Apostle', 'scented popinjay' and charming ornament of the highest society, who was steered into a political career by his uncle, Lord Salisbury, and ended up being Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, leading his party into the political wilderness for 20 years. As his government fell apart around him, nothing dented his aplomb: Brendon writes that 'The only reverse that evoked a gleam of passion in him was the Duke of Devonshire's resignation in 1903;…