“... worked with an even rarer zeal as a minister for what he saw as the national good. But late in the day – long after the period covered by these diaries – he seems to have realised that the Head was not quite the Arnold he presented himself as, that the prefects were smoking behind the cricket pavilion, that the teachers were trying to seduce the boys, and ...”

“... for the council in 1970 at the age of 22. Ten years later the young politician had put aside his day job as a teacher and was now leader of Sheffield council, a truly astonishing rise for a man with his disadvantages. Blunkett in power in Sheffield was Blunkett Mark One. He concentrated on his particular concerns of public transport and geriatric care. (A ...”

“... John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington.15 March 1994. A reply arrives from John ...”

“... She filed a bastardy suit against Scott, and won $5 a month in child support. She got $25 on her day in court, and that was all. She and her brother Luther were now in the habit of driving to Chicago, where Kathleen would flirt with men in bars and lure them out into the street so that Luther could beat them up and take their money. They tried it closer to ...”

“... Times’s Labour Editor, now the Times’s Labour Editor – is among the best reporters of the day, in his own or any other field. In the course of the miners’ strike he was paid the singular compliment (by the NUM secretary, Peter Heathfield) of being seriously thought to have bugged a crucial National Executive meeting, so accurate was his reporting of ...”

“... all, the SNP’s leaders are sufficiently well versed in the jurisprudence of their late colleague Neil MacCormick, the professor of public law at Edinburgh and another gradualist, to perceive the ‘post-sovereignty’ parameters of 21st-century interdependence. But did Cameron really blunder? Probably, insofar as he takes seriously his responsibilities as ...”

“... basis of a prejudicial perception of sex. The argument of Bostock v. Clayton County, written by Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, seemed to have defeated any effort to make sex assigned at birth permanent and unchangeable.It’s not surprising, then, that Executive Order 14168 includes among its dictates the need to correct any ‘misapplications’ of ...”

“... that leaving the ERM would be a disaster and had even raised interest rates 5 per cent in a day in order to stay in. Then, when we fell out, low inflation, faster growth and lower unemployment ensued. This was why the Government was given no credit for the economy: it had got it right only by mistake and against its will. The lesson learned by many ...”

“... notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s revolution, the ...”

“... Peacock dramatised Harrison’s relations with younger scholars – notably, D.S. MacColl, R.A. Neil and Francis Cornford – as painful scenarios in which she was always the loser. Yet Harrison, too, was inclined to see herself as repeatedly betrayed and heartbroken. Beard is uncomfortable with her claims to victim status, and hurries over these unedifying ...”

“... have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ‘social ownership’. By the time Benn contested the leadership in 1988, he was a spent force. Voted off the NEC in 1993, he could only ...”

“... the prevailing tone when she sent her notorious email on 9/11, pointing out it was ‘a very good day to get out anything we want to bury’. But then even the saintly Bill Deedes readily admitted that, when he was Macmillan’s information minister in the early 1960s, at his weekly conference of chief press officers, ‘if their news was bad, we tried to tie ...”

“... pressing for reforms, many of which are still strongly contested in this country to this day.’ For her, morality is rooted in the individual and the family: he is less clear on this, but it seems he would root it in class, though his conception is not strictly Marxist. Both adore the memory of their fathers. From hers, she takes a dedication to ...”

“... had good reason. Little blame can be attached to the politicians who cultivated Maxwell, such as Neil Kinnock. How could any Labour leader afford to alienate the owner of the biggest Labour-supporting newspaper? As for the Mirror’s journalists, working for Maxwell was no doubt grim – but most newspapers have proprietors who are less than ideal. There ...”

“... ideas of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, they did as they were told. (The celibacy rule is to this day so tightly enforced that there are separate times for men and women to use Camp Ashraf’s petrol station.) Members were urged to transfer their passions from their former spouses to their leaders, the Rajavis. Aware that people were becoming sexually ...”