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“... the name of Thatcher to reverberate round the planet. As I know from close-quarters experience of James Callaghan on Devolution, Ted Heath on the miners and Michael McGahey, Harold Wilson on Rhodesia and Harold Macmillan on Profumo, occupants of 10 Downing Street can come to see the world in highly personal and in gladiatorial terms. It may have been the ...”

“... agreement, who acted uprightly and failed, seeps through, as does his dislike of De Valera and Sir James Craig. His good guys were duped and let down, while the last two died in their beds, full of Irish honours. Thus O’Connell and Parnell seem to react primarily to English stimuli, and the autonomous growth of Sinn Fein occurs in a chapter given over ...”

“... from his predecessor, found some constructive work for it to do. For the Think Tank members, James Callaghan emerges as the premier for whom it was easiest to work because he never pretended to know all the answers, and positively welcomed a variety of advice. A similiar attitude had been essential to the success of Lloyd George’s secretariat. His ...”

“... the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what happened when James Callaghan resigned the leadership late in 1980. At that point the new machinery for electing the leader – designed to outweigh the traditionally right-wing bias of the Parliamentary Labour Party – had not yet been established, and the election was ...”

“... should be bad: he despised the very 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 ...”

“... one moment very good and sensible, at another moment totally lacking in judgment’. James Callaghan ‘causes me a bit of concern ... he is a most talented Parliamentarian and a man of very considerable charm, but he seems to me to have absolutely no philosophical basis. You never know what he is going to say.’ Of Edith ...”

“... Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking in the magical St Ebbes quarter (recently flattened by commercial interests), playing dominoes with ...”

“... with panic; it was then that the ‘siege economy’, the ‘East European state’, and James Callaghan as the Janos Kadar of the West, emerged as incontestable facts. It was then that we discovered that Britain was ungovernable – or worse, that Britain was being governed, but by the Trade Unions. Furthermore, the Unions were not (so the ...”

“... Mail as potentially ‘the Tory Jack Kennedy’. He was on the progressive wing of his Party. James Callaghan evidently thought that the best way to score against him in the Commons was to play this up: ‘The Right Hon. Gentleman is not fully a Socialist yet, but he is coming along.’ In his retrospective mood of repentance, Joseph played it ...”

“... Then what of blatant contradictions: ‘God is Three and God is One’? Or the speech I remember James Callaghan making when he was prime minister, in which he called for special attention to be given to the lowest paid, and to the maintenance of differentials? In religious language especially, self-contradiction has often been thought a positive ...”

“... probably the best one can say for Britain’s foot-dragging. It was the way to get shot of what James Callaghan called this ‘poisoned chalice’ with least fuss. It depended, however, on Argentina’s patience. In 1982 that finally snapped. Confused, perhaps, by the FCO’s subtle diplomacy; sharing the British military’s assessment of the ...”

“... favourite place of business, his favourite famous friend, solid, dependable former prime minister James Callaghan, who developed for the cranky banker what he called ‘a warm personal regard’ – and his favourite regulator, the Bank of England. Abedi used to complain to his progressive friends that the Bank of England would never let BCCI into its ...”

“... On 26 September​ 1849 the lord mayor of London, Sir James Duke, laid the foundation stone for the new City House of Correction at Holloway. The land had been intended for use as a burial ground for victims of the recent cholera epidemic, but the epidemic had subsided, and the anticipated dead had not arrived. ‘May God preserve the City of London/And make this place a terror to evil-doers,’ the foundation stone read ...”

“... Maudling, Heath’s rival for the Conservative leadership in 1965? Would you buy the life of James Callaghan now, if he hadn’t cashed in long ago? Did you then, for that matter? The stately progress of the Heath oeuvre reveals a certain chutzpah in an author evidently quite confident that people will still care about his life-chronicle. But that ...”

“... cannibal and killer, including of his own wives and children. David Owen, foreign secretary under James Callaghan, compared him to Pol Pot; he also looked into the possibility of having Amin assassinated.But Ugandan Asians are a poor fit as victims. For a start, the expulsion meant different things to different people. For a substantial group – the ...”