“... which differed even more from Ramsay MacDonald’s. And so on. We could argue, indeed, that Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism presented as much of a challenge to the ideological status quo within the Labour Party as the proponents of New Labour have done; yet Crosland never imagined that he was re-creating the ...”

“... independent schools. Dame Kitty Anderson had presided over North London Collegiate since 1944; Anthony Chenevix-Trench moved from Brad-field to Eton while the Committee was operating. ‘His contributions,’ as Mr Carswell tells us, ‘were few.’ There was no voice on the Committee from teachers in the local authority schools, let alone from the new ...”

“... It is not hard to guess what this hard-boiled gathering – Bob Mellish, Denis Healey, Tony Crosland, Barbara Castle, Roy Jenkins, Jim Callaghan among them – made of that. Fifteen years later, Benn showed me his father’s election handbill and made the same point – one he must have made to hundreds of others. Where Thatcher rose up the English ...”

“... Wilson Administration, everyone knew that Callaghan, Jenkins, George Brown, Healey, Castle, Crosland, Shore, Benn, Stewart and Crossman were political heavyweights – while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up – from 615 before the war to 659 ...”

“... extraordinary high-pitched voice and exaggerated fidgeting. ‘He had curious movements,’ wrote Anthony Powell, ‘entering a room almost as if about to turn a cartwheel.’ In 1944, Donald Sinden found in a second-hand bookshop a copy of the attack he had made on Wilde and all his works thirty years earlier in Oscar Wilde and Myself. He made the mistake of ...”

“... the man obliged to seal the deal was the Labour MP for Grimsby, the then foreign secretary, Anthony Crosland.Barred from the rich fisheries off Iceland, Hardie turned to Norway, which, although it was outside the EEC, offered EEC fishing vessels the chance to fish there under a quota system negotiated through Brussels.* One time he arrived off ...”