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“... Despite ambitious promises, they never delivered. Most of them seemed to think it did not matter. James Callaghan, for example, believed that all the fuss about open government and the like was something got up by the chattering classes, and of no interest at all to his working-class constituents, who had more important matters on their minds. He may ...”

“... between Scottish identity and the left isn’t new. In 1924, the Independent Labour Party MP James Maxton spoke of turning ‘the English-ridden, capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly ...”

“... were the subject of constant press attack, and these criticisms were given some respectability by James Callaghan, now prime minister, who announced in a speech in Oxford in 1976 that in his view teacher training, the curriculum, classroom practice and (by extension) the comprehensives themselves were fair game. Even more unsympathetic to the ...”

“... as foreign secretary under Edward Heath. These are the lucky ones. A different fate awaited Jim Callaghan, who drifted into a burdensome obscurity after losing the 1979 election and resigning as Labour leader the following year. There is a sad letter from him in the LRB archive, responding in 1991 to a piece by Ross McKibbin praising his and Harold ...”

“... annual showpiece. Inside the Brighton Centre, a hulking, rather worn building which was opened by James Callaghan in September 1977, shortly before the close working relationship between unions and Labour governments collapsed, seemingly for good, the conference hall was quiet and two-thirds full. The upstairs galleries had been curtained off, and an ...”

“... inherits the Red Clyde. Elsewhere in Britain traditions have been ‘breached’ by the Wilson-Callaghan years when Labour’s chief raison d’être appeared to be to ensure that moderate trade-unionists and liberal dons got their share of chauffeur-driven transport and expenses-paid trips. Clive Ponting’s survey of the first phase of the ...”

“... set up in 1980 in partnership with two other former political researchers – Jenny Jeger for James Callaghan, and Wilf Weeks for Edward Heath. The benefits of Steel’s familiarity with African affairs were no doubt clear to Buckingham. There was still optimism in the air as Heritage prepared to go into Angola. But on the eve of elections which ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan ...”

“... While thinking its top man the living end. Scargill and Benn say let’s break Tebbit’s law. Jim Callaghan less bluntly says that too. Israel and Syria might go to war. The boggled mind wonders what else is new. In Berne the Polish Embassy’s front door Is opened while some breakfast is pushed through: The terrorists are hauled out bearing traces Of the ...”

“... Five of them had been arrested as they tried to get on a ferry to Belfast to attend the funeral of James McDade, a prominent IRA member who had blown himself to pieces planting a bomb in Coventry. They had left Birmingham by train less than half an hour before the bombs went off, and the bombs were planted within a few hundred yards of Birmingham’s New ...”

“... of the July deflationary measures and the headlong rout of all the promises made by Wilson, Callaghan and Jenkins, to say nothing of Crosland and Healey, and come to that Castle and Peart. Anyway, those of us who still remember Wilson’s crushing of a revolt by underpaid and exploited seafarers, and his later lame excuses for the collapse of the ...”

“... screenplays, notebooks and minor stories, but written Brobdingnagian lives of John O’Hara and James Gould Cozzens), produced a sloppy, simple-minded, adoring doorstop of a biography entitled Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. André Le Vot, a French scholar, followed in 1983 with a graceful English translation of his stately, sensitive and painstakingly ...”

“... into defensive ‘bastions’ in home waters under the ice. In The Silent Deep, Peter Hennessy and James Jinks recount the history of the Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945. Naval history as such is a new departure for Hennessy, but in his extensive writings on politics and society, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and intelligence and state secrets, he ...”

“... privilege of having proper and fruitful conversations with the Dame (Evelyn Sharp), the late Sir James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a ...”

“... a pig’s back). We stare out along the coast to Tory Island, the home of the great naive painter, James Dixon. Below us Donegal is green, still, silent and peaceful. I’m too tired that evening to open either Himself Alone or The Idiot, and in any case I want to a make a start on a new book, a collection of short essays on single poems. I wish I’d packed a ...”