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“... at whoever happens to be the bogeyman of the hour. In the 1970s and early 1980s my old friend Tony Benn was on the receiving end of a prolonged tabloid hate campaign. The Daily Express once printed a photograph of Benn daubed with a Hitler moustache. The Daily Mail – at the time engaged in one of its periodic ...”

“... right wing loudly calls the left wing cranks And no one stays calm in the altercation Except for Tony Benn, who sucks contentedly On his prop pipe and stares ahead dementedtly. What does he see there in the depths of space? Still half-defined, it sets his large heart beating. The vision clarifies and lights his face. He sees some vast canteen in which a ...”

“... manifesto was the democratisation of the antiquated political structure of this country that Tony Benn used to argue for. (He also thought the first past the post system should be left intact: a mistake, I thought, but he was obstinate on the question.) Johnson is in favour of a constitutional commission, but one can imagine its composition. Labour ...”

“... house. Their many visitors included at various times Billy Wilder, a party of fifty nuns and Tony Benn, whose thank-you letter in the form of a limerick appears in the exhibition. Their entertaining style fell somewhere between dinner party and performance art, masks might be involved, candles were pre-burned to exact heights. But the ...”

“... At midnight, von Below leaves the bunker. At 2 a.m. it starts snowing in South-East England. Tony Benn, on a train from Cairo to Jerusalem, polishes his and his friends’ shoes. Hitler, who has spent much of the day planning his suicide, goes to bed at 4.30 a.m., ‘as the first light of dawn begins to brighten the smoky Berlin sky’. The Times ...”

“... have been successful. Although he at first seemed to align himself with the broad left, voting for Tony Benn in the extremely close Benn-Healey deputy leadership contest of 1981, for example, he seems to have taken a New Labour position almost before such a thing existed. As shadow education minister in the late 1980s ...”

“... for the North American Service (‘that position,’ he writes, ‘had in fact been vacated by Tony Benn’). He worked underground in the broadcasting bunkers dug for the war; ‘in some of the studios the river Fleet could be heard rushing beneath the floorboards.’ In 1953 he was hauled up into the light of day by the Economist. From his posting ...”

“... of its first manifestation, and does not seem to be a great admirer of either Ramsay MacDonald or Tony Blair. Few of the major personalities involved in founding the paper emerge with unmixed credit from Smith’s account, least of all Clifford Sharp. Sharp’s political judgment is subjected to repeated censure, but his personal qualities leave even more to ...”

“... into passing a law to limit the reporting of evidence in divorce cases. As this book reminds us, Tony Blair raised a loud laugh against the Lords by summarising the vicissitudes of a latter-day noble creation. The first of the line bought his peerage from Lloyd George, the second was a Nazi sympathiser and the third ‘was a jailbird who had first attended ...”

“... free. Still, information is power; reputation of power is power. Assange has both. The questions Tony Benn asks of those in power then become pertinent. What power have you got? Where did it come from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? The answer to the last question, at least, is that we ...”

“... of the anger in John Silkin’s posthumously published book is directed against Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Labour’s internal wars of the late Seventies are refought here, culminating in the 1981 election for the Party’s deputy leadership, in which Silkin stood as standard-bearer for the non-Bennite Left. Although he was eliminated in the first ...”

“... in by the Reaper. It is true that renunciation is now possible, thanks to Lord Stansgate aka Tony Benn. But in my case, that would merely leave me a baronet, and you can’t formally renounce that; all you can do is conceal it, like Indian villagers who, by changing their names and their districts, can sometimes manage to pass as belonging to ...”

“... to reliance on force already. The only man who has shown common sense from the beginning is Tony Benn. He still shows it every time he speaks, and in my opinion is now the only man fit to lead the Labour Party if that party wants to free itself from the taint of imperialism and sabre-rattling. One small disadvantage of living in Hungary was that I ...”

“... But no. It has all been, and will continue to be, a miserable business. To make sure of that, Tony Benn has written a pompous and pretentious preface: ‘This book, in my considered judgment, is one of the most important political documents to have been published about the Labour Party since the war ...’ Well, I doubt whether it is that, much ...”

“... from the permanent government continued. After Labour had won the election of October 1974, Tony Benn was appointed Secretary of State at the Department of Industry. On his first day in the office he was greeted by his Permanent Secretary, Sir Anthony Part, with the words: ‘I presume, Secretary of State, that you do not intend to implement the ...”