“... some qualification. He has a chapter entitled ‘Father of the Alliance’, echoing a tribute that Roy Jenkins graciously (or shrewdly) offered to Grimond after the SDP had come into being in 1981, which might be considered as a welcome fulfilment of Grimond’s prophecies. But Barberis shows that the old man, long since retired as Liberal leader ...”

“... impressed, while, in his account of election year 1983, he seems deliberately underimpressed by Roy Jenkins holding Glasgow Hillhead, as he had been when Jenkins took it in the first place. It is the facetiousness that annoys. Is John Pilger really so dreadful? Can the Stephen Waldorf affair be taken lightly? Does ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be reminded in passing that in 1945 the Conservatives still held five of the 15 Glasgow seats: Roy Jenkins toppled the last of these when he won Hillhead.)Unquestionably, however, the most resonant items concern women – who, significantly, came by the end of the war to dominate Mass Observation’s panel of observers. There is a shrewd account by a ...”

“... just as he cannot contemplate Britain without a nuclear ‘deterrent’. Thus he commissioned Roy Jenkins to propose electoral reforms and then ignored the proposals. He set about reforming the Lords, but only mutilated it, and left its membership to the whims of the prime minister of the day. If Blair is worried about his reputation, a reform of the ...”

“... go with the Howard-speak that will be a necessary evil in the early days of a future government. Roy Jenkins had race and sex discrimination to undo; Straw needs a similar piece of moral exhibitionism. Regional government and devolution are a start but are not very popular with the electorate that matters – the English. Nor are they likely to unsettle ...”

“... by Heath. It was also something of a shock to hear that she had toyed with the idea of inviting Roy Jenkins back from Europe to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1979. Otherwise it is pretty much the story as we know it: one can, reading Young, get the feeling that one is reading ten years of the Guardian again. It is very much a political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that the Government is about to make the same mistake the fourth time running,’ writes Roy Jenkins in his foreword to the book. ‘It is quite extraordinary that a nation should be so incapable of learning.’ His tone of exasperation is understandable. The Ridley Affair shows what we are up against: not least those unflattering aspects of our ...”

“... by the national governments represented in the Council of Ministers, recovered with Presidents Roy Jenkins and Jacques Delors the degree of prestige it had had under its first President, Walter Hallstein. The Council of Ministers, in which General De Gaulle had tried to preserve the national veto, voted more often by majority – sometimes against ...”

“... Gaitskell was dead, and the revisionists needed a champion. George Brown was too unreliable, and Roy Jenkins too remote. Crosland seemed to be the man. After all, he was the high priest of revisionism. He had charted its course in happier days. Who better to lead it through the storms that followed Gaitskell’s death? For most of my Parliament – the ...”

“... new centre bloc in politics failed ignominiously: judged against their example, the prospects for Roy Jenkins in serving as pied piper of the centrists today cannot be encouraging. Of the 157 Unionists returned in the rout in January 1906, no more than 33, and probably even fewer, were free traders. The ‘whole hoggers’ had won the game, at least for ...”

“... a powerful Labour campaign against the Common Market, in itself a pejorative term on the left. But Roy Jenkins and others on Labour’s centre-right emphasised reconciliation with former enemies, highlighting in particular the community of purpose with the German Social Democrats, and stressed the importance to the ordinary British worker of trade with ...”

“... revivalist truths of Thatcherism. Significantly perhaps, it is Baldwin’s most recent biographer, Roy Jenkins, who brought to light the forgotten power of his prose. In a speech to the League of St George in l923, Baldwin spoke of ‘the sounds of England, the tinkle of the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the ...”

“... 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 ...”