“... the key decisions fell to Wilson and two inexperienced colleagues, Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay. He responded to their calm assurance with a calculating vacillation that laid the basis for a lasting distrust, even as devaluation was agreed on and announced in September 1949. The economy recovered more quickly than ministerial relations, which worsened ...”

“... with an eye to party politics, recruited able young socialists like Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay. The diaries reveal the many points of conflict between the career Civil Service and the outsiders. There were quarrels about honours: were the temporaries entitled to them? And there were differences over policy. One of Dalton’s pet ideas at the Board of ...”

“... and energy to make a difference. But regrets of that sort, at lost opportunities, what A.J.P. Taylor called turning points where Germany ‘failed to turn’, afflict every student of the country. Every spring, no matter how eloquent my lectures, Hitler comes to power and doom follows. How many times have I told a class that if only William I had died ...”

“... for insanity. But first he wanted to be rich. Warhol’s attitude to money was a cross between Jay Gatsby’s and Holly Golightly’s – he yearned for the world where money allowed you to be whoever you wanted to be, where money was confidence and confidence was character, and where each day was a promise of diamonds as big as the Ritz. Carmel Snow, who ...”

“... in advance. Then there was the cancellation of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay Khadka, by – of all people – Jack Straw. Within a few days, hospital closures had been suspended, as had the privatisation of High Street post offices. None of it earth-shattering, much of it largely symbolic, but combined with the shifts in government ...”