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“... be used in evidence against them by no fewer than three intending diarists. There they sat, Dick, Barbara and Tony, scribbling away while the nation’s fate was being decided. No wonder there was resentment among the less literary members of the Cabinet. They didn’t think it was fair. It is also a misfortune that all three of those diarists were broadly ...”

“... Yet she was a far greater figure than Ellen Wilkinson, Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield or Barbara Castle. Her neglect shows how important it is to have members of your party or faction evoking your name as part of their tradition. Perhaps the greatest recent example of what this can do for popular memory is Aneurin Bevan, whose myth reflected ...”

“... colony had more than its fair share of coverage in this period, both in Parliament (spearheaded by Barbara Castle, ‘that castellated bitch’, as a Kenyan attorney-general called her) and in the left-wing press. Castle and the others were helped by a stream of testimony from whistle-blowers in Kenya itself, which ...”

“... We also learn here that it wasn’t only nationalists who were spied on by MI5, but British MPs. (Barbara Castle had her luggage spirited away when she visited Cyprus in 1958. It was called a ‘black bag op’.) In Palestine, SIS placed limpet mines on (Jewish) refugee ships, and may then have forged documents blaming the mines on the Arabs or the ...”

“... the inner editorial meetings the most exploded ex-ministers of Labour’s sentimental ‘Left’ (Barbara Castle) and the most sinister of its unsentimental ‘Right’ (Lord Chalfont, who, unbelievably, was appointed foreign editor). This guaranteed the identification of the paper with a stultified Westminster and a discredited government. Casting about ...”

“... last stab at the problem with his attempt to reform the trade unions along the lines proposed by Barbara Castle in her famous White Paper In Place of Strife. His defeat at the hands of the trade-union movement was a turning-point of far greater significance than the humiliating, forced devaluation of the previous year. For the result was a shift in the ...”

“... judgment, Redmayne said ‘no’. Late at night on 22-23 March, George Wigg, Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle used parliamentary privilege to repeat rumours that the war secretary had had an affair with Christine Keeler, a girl who had at the same time been involved with Captain Ivanov, an attaché at the Soviet Embassy, and that he had interfered ...”

“... minister has kept diaries to equal the extraordinary raw material supplied by Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn for the delectation of students of government. The best explanation for this party discrepancy I have hit on is that whereas all people of the right enter politics to exercise power, at least some people of the left are as ...”

“... of the book, which is written in a racy style much like that of the Sunday Supplement memoirs of Barbara Castle, who gave him his job at the Supplementary Benefits Commission and whom he much admires. Donnison clearly found the world of ameliorist intellectual politics enormous fun. He is the archetype of the interventionist academic. He has sat on a ...”

“... of making lightly-veiled attacks on his colleagues in the name of the party outside. One old ally, Barbara Castle, was now ‘getting a bit sick of his clear determination to strike attitudes publicly whenever he can’. Benn was plainly no longer the good scout when Wilson could rebuke him openly: ‘You will have seen in the Cabinet today the ...”

“... core constituency, working men. Lawrence records one shipyard worker producing a picture of Barbara Castle, the charismatic minister behind Labour’s plan for industrial relations reform (anathema to these workers), saying he ‘would like to get her in the dock, do her and drown her’ – a comment that captures perfectly, if terribly, the ...”

“... a figure as his literary namesake. When James was succeeded by Bernard Ingham, who had worked for Barbara Castle, presentation certainly hotted up. Ingham gave a robust account of his new mistress’s views, stamped on the latest rumours with his trademark dismissal, ‘bunkum and balderdash’, and did not hesitate to pass on news that this or that ...”

“... by a conservative Old Etonian with no experience in industry. Some Cabinet members – Crosland, Castle, Benn – retained elements of socialist vision and occasionally mentioned principles. Even George Brown was not entirely incapable of gut reactions in the Movement’s tradition. In January 1968, the Cabinet, discussing a package of cuts, was ‘split ...”

“... as having exhibited ‘the highest degree of moral courage’, while Callaghan, even as he sacks Barbara Castle, speaks of her ‘courage and great intelligence’. Harris finds this sort of bogus generosity deeply noble, as if some of us actually take it for real. ‘Where such generosity was, in all conscience, impossible,’ adds Squire ...”

“... assistance from London. Along with his parliamentary colleagues Leslie Hale, Arthur Creech Jones, Barbara Castle and Aneurin Bevan, Brockway consistently raised the crisis in Kenya in the Commons, earning himself the nickname ‘the Member for Africa’. In 1962 he presented a petition to Parliament ‘on behalf of 158,642 citizens of the Protectorate ...”