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“... for Margaret Thatcher but might, even now, lead to their being switched to Roy Jenkins instead of Tony Benn. It is true that the record of an internal debate among the committed is not to be read as a prospectus for potential converts. But the cries of disappointment and betrayal, the denunciations of the media, Harold Wilson and the IMF, and the ...”

“... some who sat on the National Executive of the Labour Party (NEC) and they have had access to Tony Benn’s huge personal archive. They are able to quote verbatim from NEC minutes and the minutes of its subcommittees and have made extensive use of the press and of published material like the proceedings of Labour Party Conferences – when they were ...”

“... for the last two years shows no sign of loosening its hold. Though it is hard to believe that Tony Benn can actually win the deputy leadership, his attempt to do so is bound to inflict yet more damage on his torn and battered colleagues. Roy Hattersley’s quaintly-named Solidarity Campaign may reverse some of the wilder decisions taken at the ...”

“... rally in Central Hall, Westminster, unironically billed as ‘The Debate of the Decade’, between Tony Benn and the leaders of the supposed British extra-parliamentary opposition. At this event, the motion for the debate was reform versus revolution. On the cusp of the Eighties and Nineties, New Left Books offers us a discourse of positive revolutionary ...”

“... group of fat, rich nations feeding each other goodies’. Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Tony Benn led a powerful Labour campaign against the Common Market, in itself a pejorative term on the left. But Roy Jenkins and others on Labour’s centre-right emphasised reconciliation with former enemies, highlighting in particular the community of ...”

“... those changes in the relevant law which are the objective of his own legislative programme. Tony Benn’s contribution is distinguished by its unique style, which reads more like notes for a lecture than the finished article. In a series of short, staccato paragraphs, not obviously linked to any developing theme, he outlines his (not wholly ...”

“... my guess is that he may come third. The anger of the hard Left at Kinnock’s failure to vote for Tony Benn for the Deputy Leadership, and his part in blocking Ken Livingstone’s claims to Brent East on the NEC, may attract more votes – in all three sections – from the Kinnock camp than is at present estimated. Peter Shore, the other candidate who ...”

“... Campbell, eager to parade his own good-bloke credentials as well as those of his mate Tony, has not fled the limelight. He writes a column for the Times about sport and, following the lead of Tony Benn and Ann Widdecombe, has recently embarked on a tour of the nation’s theatres and concert halls, hawking ...”

“... of a politician obtained only by comparing it with the published version. In this context, Benn’s published diaries are unusually candid and useful because his methods are less vulnerable than most to later interference. As a committed techno-freak, he was dictating into a tape-recorder when most of his contemporaries were still writing in ...”

“... its birthright for a mess of potage, or a potted message, or is the medium now the massage? When Tony Benn describes the Party’s new policy document as ‘profoundly anti-Labour as well as being anti-socialist’, not to mention ‘wildly pro-European’, it is an endorsement which many social democrats will find tempting. For those of us who ...”

“... to find some way out of the impasse. In the recently-published first volume of his diaries, Tony Benn chronicles with more honesty than most of his former colleagues the fatuous failure of the first period of Wilson government. In his introduction, he writes: ‘If the British people were ever to ask themselves what power they truly enjoyed under ...”

“... Benjamin, to keep ‘control of that memory’, and to ‘blast open the continuum of history’. Tony Benn, in his foreword, still dreams of coming ‘together with a similar programme and campaigning for it relentlessly’. The alternative must be to get out of those trenches for good: or, better still, to fill them in with fragments of neoliberal ...”

“... but presenters are not known for expressing opinions and handling questions. It happens that Tony Cook is exceptionally weak in these skills and his national organisers have been trying to shield him from the press. Even if he were better at it, he would still have to suffer the prejudice against his trade: ‘He can’t say anything without an ...”

“... events certainly seem to be increasing rapidly in number and variety. Cheltenham and Hay-on-Wye (Tony Benn: ‘In my mind, it has replaced Christmas’) are well enough known, but there’s also Swindon, Sole Bay, Clerkenwell (perhaps the hippest – it had Alex from Blur and Adam and Joe), Dartington Hall, Lancaster Litfest, The Word 2000 and so on and ...”

“... detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison takes issue with Corelli ...”