“... dead hero, its living hero is Benn. Its villains are such notorious right-wing hatchetmen as Michael Foot – whose villainy seems to be compounded in the authors’ eyes by the fact that he managed to retain the affection of Labour’s rank and file. Fellow offenders include most of the members of the old Tribune Group of Labour MPs. Their crime ...”

“... on the Daily Worker he went to Tribune, where Robert Edwards was leaving to join Beaverbrook and Michael Foot, recently a Beaverbrook man, was acting editor. (Will Mervyn Jones also end up in the Beaverbrook stable? the reader anxiously wonders.) Tribune paid him £16 a week to spread himself over the paper and, after Suez, he helped ...”

“... I was put at the bottom of the list when all the great figures such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot had gone home: However, for some reason I put the audience in a frenzy. After I had finished and gone home, the audience swarmed out and laid siege to No 10 Downing Street. It was a very satisfactory start to the Campaign for Nuclear ...”

“... Disraeli, a miscellany of works which I also passed by, Disraeli not being my favourite man – Michael Foot can have him; Asquith, 600 pages of love-letters to a girl not half his age; Churchill, first of two volumes of biography by an American writer, a disquisition on his political philosophy, and a massive collection of documents relating to his ...”

“... to bring back the 1960s, this is at any rate not so deeply atavistic as the other parties. Under Michael Foot, Labour would clearly like to bring back the 1940s, and the author of that meretricious tract Guilty Men is for ever trying to speak for England and to tell the Prime Minister that she must, in the name of God, go. The Tories, meanwhile, have ...”

“... to the high point it enjoyed during the Second World War, first under Frank Owen and then under Michael Foot. Editing the Evening Standard was a much tougher task for Wintour than for his more recent successors, since the Rothermere Evening News was still in his time outselling its rival in the London market by roughly half a million copies every ...”

“... to be missed and appreciated. As the Labour Party ran slowly downhill under Wilson, Callaghan and Foot, Attlee shuffled uphill to join the immortals. Comparisons between past and present told heavily in Attlee’s favour, and the golden age of 1945 took its place in Labour mythology. Both Left and Right of the Party looked back to 1945 and claimed to inherit ...”

“... for his long-standing support of left-wing policies in relation to the EEC and to disarmament, Michael Foot owes his recent election as leader mainly to the fact that he is loved, admired and trusted as an unswerving democrat by colleagues from end to end of the Parliamentary Party; and he certainly sees his role as that of conciliator in the ...”

“... same side as their leader. Rather than acting as a vehicle for Bevan’s views, Tribune, edited by Michael Foot, described itself as leading the campaign against the H-bomb. Lee believed that the Bevanites’ desertion was responsible for the cancer that killed Bevan in 1960: ‘until their attacks began, he never had so much as a stomach ache,’ she ...”

“... the classic British style of ‘sympathetic’ interviewing – as practised, for example, by Michael Aspel, Miriam Stoppard or Jimmy Young – has an ancient lineage. Eden’s problem was not so much that he thought he was terrific on TV (though he did), but that he saw television as essentially a kind of megaphone for the Government. So it was with the ...”

“... leader and putattive prime minister. It is sometimes forgotten that it was not the election of Michael Foot to succeed James Callaghan or the drift to unilateral nuclear disarmament that provided the occasion for the launch of the SDP, but this enhancement of trade-union power. There is nothing in this book about health and little about education, the ...”

“... Italy and that the areas of poverty precisely corresponded to the areas of poverty of that land. Michael Foot, she feels, is altogether too old and she did not share his belief that if Reagan could make it to the White House he could do the same. She adds the surprising comment that he is more suited to the trench warfare of Fleet Street than to the ...”

“... their media-men (like most British media-men) lean towards the SDP and they point to the fact that Michael Foot’s huge overflow meeting attracted less press wonder and applause than Shirley Williams’s. But to a Londoner, these local papers seem pretty fair and accurate – stating but not overstating the obvious fact, recognised by the Telegraph ...”

“... is no coincidence that the best political styles belong to Enoch Powell, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn and Michael Foot, all men ‘committed to working on and defending the idea of the United Kingdom’. As it happens, Mr Powell himself contributes a piece on ‘The Language of Politics’, in which he concludes that although speeches are briefer and politicians ...”

“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his ...”