“... Just over a quarter of a century ago, shortly after Ted Heath’s surprise defeat of the Wilson Government, Tony Benn addressed a Fabian Society meeting in a gloomy Westminster basement. With his usual happy choice of language, he described how fired-up he had been on eventually becoming a minister in Wilson’s Cabinet; he had always wanted to get his hands on the levers of power, he said, and at last he was going to do just that ...”

“... It is clear that Benn has the same sentimental attitude to Parliament that we associate with Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. But ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’ is one of the polite fictions of modern Britain: it permits the executive, judiciary and bureaucracy to do whatever they wish – usually in secret – precisely in the manner that these diaries ...”

“... in 1951. From the start, the Kinnock-Hattersley leadership has been hemmed in by the legacy of the Wilson Government of the Sixties, and by the even more disreputable legacy of the Wilson-Callaghan Government of the Seventies. It has no incomes policy because it has been unwilling to re-open the wounds left by the 1966 wage ...”

“... Carrie’s point of view. However, every truthful diary (even from such sturdy fellows as Edmund Wilson or Sir Peter Hall) shows up the writer in a ludicrous light, all the little manias and depressions exposed. Carrie is as Pooterish as her husband. Much of her time is devoted to plotting against him, devising schemes for moving the family away from boring ...”

“... an affair with the economist Thomas Balogh, who dropped her for Murdoch, who was involved with Michael Foot, an intelligence officer (the military historian M.R.D. Foot, not the politician). At Balogh’s insistence, Murdoch broke up with Michael, who found comfort with Philippa; they were married after the war, from ...”

“... major trade-union leader of recent times was under regular surveillance by MI 5 ... Yet both Wilson and Heath forbade any interrogation.’ Pincher does not exaggerate the importance of the pre-war Cambridge connection, with one exception. That is John Cairncross, a non-smart Cambridge man of Scottish working-class background, who though detected in 1951 ...”

“... to be fed up with the Democrats’ inability to get bills through Congress.In What It Took to Win, Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’. Kazin has been engaged with Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John ...”

“... being closely attended to, even feared, by ministers and by the public. And it was feared. Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 and 1974-76 Governments and James Callaghan’s 1976-79 Administration spent more time cajoling, ‘standing up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the ...”

“... Balzac,’ Buczacki writes. When Asquith’s letters to Venetia were published in 1982, edited by Michael and Eleanor Brock, only around half of the total 300,000 words were included. Buczacki has read the other half and found that the editors omitted a lot of social gossip and an even larger quantity of ‘desperately boring material containing practically ...”

“... and there was nothing calculated about his charm. His letters, some of which Jean Moorcroft Wilson used to excellent effect in her biography of 1985, are more immediately engaging than those of Wilfred Owen, if less touching. Sorley enjoyed a better start in life, his father being Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and his mother a ...”

“... more than ‘a crumb on the banquet table of MGM’, Nancy Davis wangled a date with Ronald Wilson Reagan. For more than two years, however, the rest was not history, but still more anxious striving on her part. Reagan had just been dropped by his wife, Jane Wyman, and was doing the rounds of B-movie starlets. It was only when Nancy got pregnant that he ...”

“... believers, was the cadre of talent that would (once the inconvenient hiatus represented by Harold Wilson had duly disappeared) surely supply the leader to fulfil the revisionist prophecies. It would obviously be fallacious to suppose that personal ambition burns less strongly today in Labour politics than it did a generation ago. Indeed, it may be nearer the ...”

“... Kazin eventually became the most prominent and influential working reviewer in America (Edmund Wilson gave up this role sometime during the 1930s). More than that, he was reviewing books at a time when Americans believed very much in the necessity of doing so – they were taking over the world, after all, and should know some things about Culture. (The ...”

“... since Labour began electing ‘leaders’) never to have held a ministerial post – being PPS to Michael Foot for a year does not count. He is the only British party leader to have been an EU Commissioner – and is likely to remain so. As a result his record in ‘government’ is hard to judge, since what the Commissioners do (unless it is thought to be ...”

“... Tories, metropolitan eggheads, unofficial strikers, disbelievers in the Yorkshire sage Harold Wilson and all those too feckless to see the connection between muck and brass. Reading his reprinted stuff, which was mostly written out of a sort of turgid, inarticulate resentment rather than with real rage or outrage, one recalls the blustering world of ...”