Reith's obsessive attachments to younger boys, his marriage and subsequent bizarre relationships with women spice this story of a grim managerialist. Robinson's account prompts the question of how Reith, who professed himself a Gladstonian liberal, built up a monopoly structure for the BBC, seeking to veto competition and ensure the lion's share of a hypothecated public tax, the licence fee, while promoting through this managed organ just the sort of monolithic view of public  education which that great and true Victorian, Gladstone, had opposed.

For Arthur Bryant, what mattered was a view of England, the island story conceived as a great romantic adventure, a note he struck with his first and spectacularly successful biography of Charles II. The first child of a member of Queen Victoria's secretariat, Bryant became a propagandist for the Conservative party, and in wartime he looked back to England's glories. Bryant was no mere stooge, however: his edition of Alan Brooke's wartime diaries was seen as depicting Churchill in an unfavourable light.

Robinson's enthusiasm for his subjects and racy account of their oddities makes for a volume that is enjoyable to read. But his view that the four men were people left behind, clinging to Victorian values, is unconvincing. Religious and moral conviction in politics may seem a throwback to the Victorian age, out of step with the progressive era heralded by shorter hemlines, moving pictures and the motor car. But that is to look through secular 21st-century eyes. True, religion is not a fashionable cause for politicians; indeed it has hardly been one since the 17th century, and certainly was not in Victoria's time, despite Gladstone's apparent wish to put God back into politics. Yet the underpinning of English society, its voluntary, educational, charitable and institutional base, cannot be separated from its religious and denominational evolution. It remains central to political debate and is no longer confined to charities and schooling but affects the debate about citizenship, immigration, the operation of the law and the exercise of autocratic powers by the state.Eccentrics they may have been, but Robinson's famous four lived by values, moral and religious, that fit firmly within the gamut of the 20th century and even our own.