“... union by killing nationalism in Scotland ‘stone dead’, in the words of the Labour politician George Robertson. Under the Additional Member System introduced for elections to the Scottish Parliament, regional list MSPs are elected on a formula designed to correct the unrepresentative results which arise from the use of first past the post elections for ...”

“... moral reminders from Labour Party history. Benn’s father led the Liberal defection from Lloyd George in 1924, and stood up in Ramsay MacDonald’s ill-fated Cabinet to argue against dole cuts in 1931. Michael died as the brave new postwar world of the UN and the welfare state was taking shape. The diaries also record ...”

“... to fit it. Yet this, again, is hardly true. Some English, for instance, might have feared Lloyd George or Bevan, but many more respected and hardly any mocked them. The problem was, as Westlake notes, that Kinnock’s career was ‘founded on his oratorical powers’, not on any great achievement in government or politics, and that he was perhaps the last ...”

“... suspected subsequently that if anybody had scored a black mark it was me. Those were the days when George Wigg was watching us. Wilson and Icontinued to get on well enough when we met, which was only occasionally, but one was never sure who had last whispered what in his ear and in the end it became possible only for journalists who were prepared to become ...”

“... wet kisses.’ Nor was Lydia without political judgment. During the General Election of 1931, when MacDonald and Baldwin joined forces in the National Government, she wrote: ‘I have rolled my eyes on the manifestos of Ramsey and Stanley, but they close instantaneously with dreariness.’ Through his marriage to Lydia, Keynes broke with the more neurotic ...”

“... the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers. He was in the private sitting room of Number Ten when Ramsay MacDonald returned from the palace on resigning. He belonged to ...”

“... spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her like a kite at the end of a string’. George Wyndham, Margot Asquith. ‘When I read of Parnell or Lasalle or smaller men who have arrested attention,’ Margot confided in her diary in her twenties, ‘I feel full of envy, and wish I had been born a man. In a woman all this internal urging is a ...”

“... Friday, 31 January 1919, when troops and tanks stood by to quell a mass rally, in Glasgow’s George Square, of West of Scotland workers campaigning for a forty-hour week, the event was remembered in the People’s Palace, the museum of labour history on Glasgow Green. A bronze bust of Willie Gallacher by Ian Walters was not so much unveiled as ...”

“... on one side, Unitarian on the other. All three Trevelyan brothers were unbelievers, but with George it was much more than mere absence of belief, it was a creed in its own right. ‘Two terrible things have happened this week,’ he was heard to say, ‘my son has bought a motorbike and my daughter has become a Christian.’ As a young don, he was turned ...”

“... life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that period, helped along by my mother’s stories of their family friend ...”

“... Tory conferences where the mood could best be described as hostile – yet David Cameron and even George Osborne appear genuinely committed to the project. They see it as a way of boosting business and of demonstrating their credentials as modernisers. They also believe it will help their electoral prospects in the North. The fate of HS2 doesn’t just lie in ...”

“... remain a stinging nettle in the path of all ‘life-writers’. In the introduction to his life of George Orwell, Crick said that most biographies were just dressed-up historical novels. They drafted a nicely shaped psychological plot for their subjects, and then – whenever the subject failed to follow that plot – twisted or invented the evidence with ...”

“... over Vietnam, and the same MI5 and MI6 whom he had encouraged via the good offices of the bad George Wigg, were to find him unsound in spite of (or perhaps also partly because of?) his gruesome eagerness to please. None of Wilson’s exculpatory recent biographers has troubled to minute this irony, if indeed it is one.There came a time, late in the life ...”

“... Women’s Freedom League; the Cat and Mouse and Dickinson Bills date from 1913, not 1912; Ramsay MacDonald and Kathleen Courtney and Willoughby Dickinson are mis-spelt; Andrew Rosen gets the wrong Christian name on page 29; and the misleading term ‘radical suffragist’ is used to denote Lancashire working-class non-militants – a term not used at the ...”

“... competition.With imperial responsibilities came a new hauteur towards Indigenous peoples. Sir George Simpson, the HBC’s governor in North America, turned against the custom of factors taking ‘country’ wives, dismissing them as ‘bits of copper’. In 1846, the settlement of the American border at the 49th parallel forced the HBC to retreat ...”