“... governments are inadequately detailed. Major blunders, such as the handling of the UWC strike by Harold Wilson and Merlyn Rees, are skated over. It is quite clear from Rees’s memoirs that the British Government had no intention of facing up to the Loyalists. All the same, the authors have come up with some extremely interesting titbits. For ...”

“... the ballot box’ to determine whether Britain should join. After winning the election, Harold Wilson renegotiated Heath’s terms of entry, then put the deal before the electorate in a referendum in 1975. His appeal to popular sovereignty immediately generated a distinctive kind of non-parliamentary politics. While the prime minister ...”

“... by being fêted on the lawn of the White House by American Presidents, whoever they were – and Harold Wilson adored being invited to LBJ’s ranch. Mrs Thatcher appears to have taken the view that almost anything goes, so far as the deployment of US Forces is concerned. But her government is in a deeply contradictory position, as Campbell points ...”

“... grousemoor Tories, metropolitan eggheads, unofficial strikers, disbelievers in the Yorkshire sage Harold Wilson and all those too feckless to see the connection between muck and brass. Reading his reprinted stuff, which was mostly written out of a sort of turgid, inarticulate resentment rather than with real rage or outrage, one recalls the blustering ...”

“... that Zuckerman had an answer, but his logic forced people to put the correct questions. In 1964, Harold Wilson asked Zuckerman to go to the House of Lords and become Minister for Disarmament. Zuckerman very sensibly calculated that he could be more use as a civil servant. In 1966, Wilson sent him to the Cabinet Office ...”

“... It’s a strange thing,’ said Harold Macmillan after becoming Prime Minister, ‘that I have now got the biggest job I ever had, and less help in doing it than I have ever known.’ He referred, of course, to the absence of any significant department for the Prime Minister – the ‘hole in the centre of the system’, as Lord Hunt put it ...”

“... it. Nobody loved him, whether they accepted his charges – a Russian mole in MI5, the ‘Wilson plot’ – or not. This is understandable. Ministers (like Churchill) resent the betrayal of trust; outsiders are bound to be sceptical. Spies are liars by vocation, certainly if they’re involved in disinformation, as Rimington admits she was. They have ...”

“... a commie in its backyard and so plotted to remove him covertly, with Colonial Office connivance. Harold Macmillan remarked on the irony of an ‘anti-imperialist’ America pleading with Britain to ‘stick to “Colonialism” and “Imperialism” at any cost.’ Walton cites the repercussions of this as an early example of Chalmers Johnson’s theory of ...”

“... every subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to mention Lord Balogh, the Balliol don Harold Wilson recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway without throwing in a ...”

“... accusations of downright plagiarism from Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote indignantly to Edmund Wilson: I’d like to put you on to something about Steinbeck. He is a rather cagey cribber. Most of us begin as imitators but it is something else for a man of his years and reputation to steal a whole scene as he did in Mice and Men. I’m sending you a marked ...”

“... of seats of denying Labour a majority in the general election of 1964. Facing the derision of Harold Wilson, who seemed able to walk on water as leader of the opposition, Home found the perfect riposte in his remark about the ‘14th Mr Wilson’. This off-the-cuff remark turns out to have been crafted by that ...”

“... in Northern Ireland in April 1974. By 1976, the back of the Labour Government had been broken. Harold Wilson resigned, and begged his successor, James Callaghan, to carry out a full-scale investigation into what he felt had been the subversion of his office by the security services. Callaghan refused. Although ...”

“... in hullaballoo, yah-booh dominates, and the Prime Minister slides off every potential hook. Harold Macmillan used – rightly – to transfer to departmental ministers any question that was not the Prime Minister’s particular responsibility. This meant that there were usually eight or nine questions of substance on the Order Paper, in the hope that ...”

“... Parliamentary Party. The equivalent Conservative tradition – the tradition once exemplified by Harold Macmillan and Iain Macleod – is in eclipse. Outside formal politics, the intellectual running is increasingly being made by neo-Marxism on the left and by a curiously febrile neo-liberalism on the right. Mutatis mutandis, much the same is true of the ...”

“... 24 hours in the Ministerial timetable. Gavshon had immediate access not only to Crossman but to Harold Wilson, Tony Crosland and other Cabinet Ministers, as he had to Ted Heath, Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Macmillan. The questions on the Belgrano came from a man who has had interviews alone with Presidents of the ...”