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“... Sunday Express as he was getting from the Government.’ Reginald Maudling, Alec Home and even Ted Heath appear among the intimates. At Home’s 80th birthday party, given by Rupert Murdoch, ‘who hardly knew Alec’, Junor finds himself among a mere 20 people and is pathetically grateful that Alec has done him ‘the extraordinary honour’ of inviting him ...”

“... teaching it to obey simple commands in French), and much about the comings and goings of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Roy Jenkins, Prince Charles and the like – plenty of material here for a comparative study of the discourteous and the bibulous, with suggestions of an inverse correlation between the two. At one ...”

“... rebel. The split in the Labour Party over Europe was to be decisive. It led to the resignation of Roy Jenkins as Deputy Leader and to the breakdown of the old, controlling alliance on the centre-right of the party. The SDP, when it emerged ten years later, was the lineal descendant of the Labour rebellion. But dissent in the Conservative Party presented no ...”

“... like trains’), take up more space than dramatic development does. René’s girlfriend, Suchitra Roy, a filmmaker who, like Riya, has an intense relationship with New York City, suggests he has fixated on the Goldens because they represent ‘aspects of your own nature’, and he admits that he sublimates his feelings ‘into movie references’. These ...”

“... that she was a politician. She had survived a near death experience as education secretary in the Heath government, when her decision to scrap free milk in primary schools for children aged seven and over made her for a while the most unpopular politician in the country (‘Milksnatcher’). It had been a grisly time and had tested even her energy and ...”

“... chapter, several entertaining examples of such innovation, beginning with the description of Mr Heath by the Times as ‘a doorstep loser’, which, as he remarks, involved no allusion to any propensity on Mr Heath’s part to mislay doorsteps. He refers disparagingly to explanations of such innovatory uses by ‘orthodox ...”

“... spokesmen, advocates or analysts had ever disguised its ambitions. In 1962, when Edward Heath was first negotiating terms for British membership, one of his French interlocutors – later a minister – made the point in words reminiscent of a British Army marching song. ‘We don’t know where we’re going,’ he said. ‘All we know is that ...”

“... slightly smug later version. And there is something mildly provoking about his elaboration of the Roy Jenkins-style good life: Fiona and Jack, with their charming Gray’s Inn flat, their holidays in Meribel and ‘the cheaper sort of castle’, their interesting political discussions, their prosciutto and olives, their ‘warmed pain aux raisins from ...”

“... 1974, tripling its popular vote. Although tempted by the prospect of coalition with Edward Heath’s Conservatives (Labour had emerged as the largest party, but without an overall majority), Thorpe was persuaded by his parliamentary party not to do a deal without a guarantee of electoral reform. He left his successors good cause to credit him with ...”

“... Labour leader, Harold Wilson. The ‘warm-up’ was a brilliant speech by the MP for Stechford, Roy Jenkins, who described his leader as ‘the greatest Parliamentarian of his generation’. The acclamation for Wilson as he rose to speak, diminutive behind a huge lectern, was deafening. I noticed that he had few notes – perhaps one sheet of paper with a ...”

“... Rothschilds before rising through the ranks of the Gaullist administration. A year later, Edward Heath succeeded Wilson, heading a Conservative government in a time of decolonisation. Unlike any other British prime minister of the postwar epoch, Heath was overwhelmingly oriented to Europe, where he had fought during the ...”

“... medieval wall-paintings. It’s an immensely appealing place, not unlike Lead in Yorkshire or Heath near Ludlow. Good graves on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock ...”

“... November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a thousand pages. A great virtue of John Keegan’s is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually and ...”

“... this so? The answer is probably to be found in the entry of 22 November 1979, where he writes (of Roy Jenkins’s Dimbleby Lecture): ‘Of course there always has been a centre party in British politics in the 20th century: it is made up of Butskellites, including Macmillan, Callaghan, Wilson and Heath at one stage. It is ...”

“... and Ray Honeyford (the former Bradford headmaster). It seems equally fruitless to complain of Roy Kerridge, a persuasive journalist whose picturesque remarks about blacks seem always to offend them, and of a journalist called ‘the Angry Voice’ in the Daily Star. Some of these men are quite skilled sophists and coat-trailers: to respond to their ...”