“... your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The straight-dealing Tony Blair would, they say, prefer that this was unnecessary and does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for political manipulation ...”

“... words, his ‘cringing submission to Lyndon Johnson’. Interestingly, the then Mr Wedgwood Benn, who had very different views on these and other matters before he assumed the title of ‘Tony Benn’, also leaned in the same direction. Young quotes the Crossman Diaries: ‘...”

“... protest? There are 23 pieces from 1990 to 1998. Some deserve inclusion: Aung San Suu Kyi, Tony Benn, Will Hutton and Graham Harvey. It’s right to have a protest against the Gulf War but why five of them? (Oh. MacArthur edited Gulf War Despatches.) Then there are two pieces about foxes and two about Princess Diana. Is the odd hunting of a fox ...”

“... in the Labour Party’s giddy spasm in the early Eighties. Having narrowly failed to elect Tony Benn its deputy leader, it nonetheless offered the electorate an unreconstructed Bennite programme in 1983 – but half-heartedly, since most of the leadership did not believe in it anyway. Such symptoms of ideological bankruptcy were both cause and ...”

“... than through the violent and often treacherous turns of armed revolution.’ Now everyone from Tony Blair to Tony Benn agrees with that. Less convincing perhaps is Cooper’s claim that Allende ‘had few counterparts among politicians of the 20th century’. (How would Gandhi rate, you wonder, against the bold but ...”

“... of the Labour movement. Beginning in 1973, this reached its furthest point in 1981, when Tony Benn failed by only a hair’s breadth to win the Deputy Leadership in an election conducted within the new electoral college which has wrested power from the Parliamentary Labour Party. The apotheosis of Bennite socialism was achieved in 1983, when he ...”

“... for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an astute chronicler of his subjects’ fortunes over the decades, and a fair-minded referee of their battles with Labour’s centrists. His story begins with Benn’s self-reinvention ...”

“... offend, have much straight talking. How do they read now? The reader should probably start with ‘Tony Benn, Neil Kinnock and the Travails of Labour’ (a review of Benn’s 1963-67 diaries and Hilary Wainwright’s Labour: A Tale of Two Parties) and ‘Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson’. The first began, I ...”

“... behind-the-scenes suggestions to decision-makers, and spoke for the perennial opposition: as the Tony Benn of the Forties (but, it must be said, in worse prose). Here lay Laski’s strength, but also his limits. Once the Left had achieved its triumph, which was to push the Party into breaking with Churchill and to fight the 1945 election on an, by our ...”

“... part to a perceived discrepancy between his upper-class background and his radical politics (cf. Tony Benn), and in part to persistent accusations and rumours that he was soft on the Russians, if not a KGB mole. But, critics have asked, would a lone madman susceptible to violent anti-Palme feelings carry out the murder with such apparent coolness and ...”

“... any mixture of the two can flourish. However, FISHBOPWIFWAF has declined with the sinking star of Tony Benn, and Labour is left with an uninspiring programme deriving from Keynes, Churchill and Pitt the Younger. The Alliance proclaim the need for institutional reform, which is to their credit, but their motives still seem conservative – restoring ...”

“... The Arabs? The Blacks? And who was to be the saviour? Enoch Powell? Keith Joseph? The Maharishi? Tony Benn? One man’s saviour, of course, is another man’s scapegoat; and the European Community, with its rhetoric of ‘growth’ and ‘progress’, filled the double bill. Associating it with faceless international airport modernity, gigantism, greed ...”

“... exist. Not surprisingly, this simply makes the crisis worse. The neo-Marxist solution, peddled by Tony Benn and Stuart Holland, is to take over the planning system by huge extensions of public ownership. That would produce even faster industrial sclerosis than we have already, and make the state even mightier and more overloaded. It is silly to pretend ...”

“... of overthrowing the Labour Government. James’s contribution was an ingenious plan to impeach Tony Benn (he does not reveal what for) – a plan which, to James’s disgust, was peremptorily turned down by Monday Club MPs. By 1988 Astra had snapped up two mighty subsidiaries, the Walters group in the US and BMARC, an arms company based in ...”

“... of a flight to Bahrain, to ‘prove the route’ for British Airways, his phone rang. It was Tony Benn, Secretary of State for Industry. Mr Trubshaw, Benn said, I understand you’re off to Bahrain next week; is there a chance you could organise a flight for me and some of the chaps before you go? Certainly ...”