“... evil face, both when silent and when speechifying’. Others went further. According to Dalton, Roy Jenkins described Bevan’s performances at the party meetings following his resignation as ‘sub-human’. If Crossman’s diary is to be trusted, Gaitskell even saw ‘extraordinary parallels between Nye and Adolf Hitler’. Of course, it would be ...”

“... is Mr Gorbachev going to be on Blankety Blank?’ Oxford, 14 March. To Oxford to cast my vote for Roy Jenkins as Chancellor. Only 9.30, but the line of voters is already round the Sheldonian and the atmosphere that of a cocktail party. The average voter is about my age, tall and armed with a beaming wife, both determined to make a day of it. Never was ...”

“... Crossman, Douglas Jay), other public school boys (Benn, Crosland) or public school wannabes like Roy Jenkins, and who, to top it all, was having an affair with an aristocratic Tory woman and loved nothing better than to dance the night away at the Gargoyle Club, the haunt of upper-class revellers and gays, including Burgess and Maclean. A charmer, a ...”

“... would never be enough. Once tempted, politicians would be unable to keep their hands off what Roy Jenkins called ‘a more powerful weapon against progressive legislation than anything we have known in this country since the curbing of the absolute powers of the House of Lords’. But it turned out that one referendum was exactly enough and the ...”

“... of English writers – prize above thoughtfulness, and certainly above difficulty or discovery. Roy Jenkins writes nicely, but we prefer the bumbling, scabrous, impenitent confessions of a minor Tory toff. Long before Nancy’s inspired wind-up on posh lingo was published in Encounter in 1955 – and long before the idea of a ‘booklet’ on left ...”

“... to participate on both sides of the debate. The cross-party Britain in Europe campaign was led by Roy Jenkins, then Labour home secretary, and supported by moderate consensus Tories such as Whitelaw and Maudling, the former Liberal leader Jo Grimond and middle-of-the-road Labour politicians like Cledwyn Hughes. On the other side of the argument were the ...”

“... of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the Government of 1951-55) are predictably good. The uneven John Keegan (... ’s Strategy), though seemingly disqualified by his recent published confession that he cannot understand Clausewitz, nevertheless succeeds here, correctly citing the ...”

“... detail, Dick’s are by far the best. This is not to say that they are the most truthful – Roy Jenkins has declared that Barbara’s are more accurate. Nor does it mean that they give the most effective picture of how it was to be there. They are simply the best read, and by a long, long way. What is extraordinary about the Crossman diaries, and ...”

“... that comes before Cabinet.’ Followed by an equally peevish plaint: ‘John, why does he have Roy Jenkins to dinner?’ John’s retort has the right note of manly sagacity. ‘ “You have nothing to fear from Ian,” I replied. “He will never put the dagger in your back.” And this she accepted.’ After this lunch, Junor wanted to be quite sure ...”

“... commands in French), and much about the comings and goings of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Roy Jenkins, Prince Charles and the like – plenty of material here for a comparative study of the discourteous and the bibulous, with suggestions of an inverse correlation between the two. At one point in Henderson’s career, however, the role of ...”

“... reject intergovernmental co-operation à l’anglaise in favour of the ‘Community method’, and Roy Jenkins to relaunch the concept of monetary union during his first year as President of the Commission. With all its faults, the EEC is still the best available prototype of the sort of transnational power-sharing to which his analysis points. The ...”

“... the attempt on which William Rodgers and David Owen seem to be embarked, and which has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but without either a social base or alternative policies – you who once knew the ...”

“... the Australian offshoot of the giant British conglomerate RTZ. Both men were at Oxford. Thus, as Roy Jenkins used to be the Conservative Party’s favourite Labour politician, so Hawke was the Australian Right’s favourite man of the Left – if he really was of the Left. His accession to power did not cause any capitalists to leap out of windows. The ...”

“... to take Keynes’s advice in 1931 than that of the Bank of England’. Marquand, who followed Roy Jenkins into the Social Democratic Party in 1981, conceded that it was ‘no longer obvious that Keynes was right in 1931 and the bankers wrong’, or that governments could flout the financial markets. MacDonald, he now wrote, had been ‘not just ...”

“... Derick Heathcoat Amory. To support his view, the prime minister had the great Keynesian economist Roy Harrod writing to him by almost every post urging him to reflate faster. Much of the summer holidays of 1958 and 1959 I spent in Norfolk with my schoolfriend Henry Harrod, and we would cycle to the postbox through the cornfields, proudly carrying his ...”