“... between the two protagonists, but updating the story with the recent work of Colin Matthew, Roy Jenkins, Richard Shannon, John Vincent, Sarah Bradford and Stanley Weintraub. Essentially it’s dry-bones parliamentary history – elections, cabinets, reshuffles, bills, budgets, divisions, dissolutions – and its verdict on the falling out hardly ...”

“... around local activity, the other is the inspiration of a small group of Parliamentary politicians: Roy Jenkins, one notes, was among those expressing hostility to community politics. However, time has already blurred such differences. The SDP bounded into prominence, professional and computerised, with the belief that the key lay in communication by ...”

“... also produced a string of politicians, including Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath.Murray’s family may not have been Balliol men (he was the third generation of his family to study across the road at Exeter College), but their scholarly and civil service genealogy conforms to its ethos, and Murray hints at a ...”

“... trolls Will find her shapelier than Betty Grable, While making sure a solemn tocsin tolls To tell Roy Jenkins he is not Clark Gable. About the top spot there’ll be much palaver As some fans cry bravo! and others brava! Someone will have to lead the SDP. Ten Downing Street won’t sleep a whole committee. In all good time a choice there’ll have to be ...”

“... was handing a poisoned chalice to his successor: indeed, not long afterwards he was to confide to Roy Jenkins that he felt there was no future for either the Labour Government or the Labour Party and that coalitionism was the only solution. Harold simply got out while the going was relatively good. When the IMF crisis broke a few months later he rushed ...”

“... November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a thousand pages. A great virtue of John Keegan’s is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually ...”

“... original letters were Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert in their multi-volume Churchill and Roy Jenkins in his Asquith (1964). Their versions were far more accurate than anything that had appeared before, but copyright remained a problem, for Lady Violet Bonham Carter (Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury) was still alive and was anxious – some would say ...”

“... it, which laid the foundations of Livingstone’s politics. In this very long autobiography – Roy Jenkins managed Gladstone’s life in less – the most rewarding pages come near the beginning. A politician who believes he can still win power is likely to present himself in the best of lights, or at least suppress any awkward self-knowledge he may ...”

“... Is there any reason to believe that things will be different this time? No home secretary since Roy Jenkins, and hardly any before him, has presided over an extension of our liberties. Blunkett did not buck this trend. At a time when, it turned out, Britain needed a home secretary with a keen understanding of the balance between liberty and ...”

“... remained law well into the 19th century. Nine clauses survived the Victorian tidying up, until Roy Jenkins in 1965 set up the Law Commission, which carried out a further winnowing. Even today we still have Clause 40 about not selling, denying or delaying justice, and Clause 39, that no free man is to be imprisoned or dispossessed ‘save by the lawful ...”

“... admires Pankhurst’s politics, for biography is often driven by identification: why else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has ...”

“... for example. Mild disapproval awaits those who in some sense betray the Party, whether (like Roy Jenkins) by leaving it, or (like the Militant Tendency, Tony Benn, Moss Evans or Arthur Scargill) by embarrassing it. ‘My criticisms,’ says Morgan, ‘are criticisms from within.’ This standpoint causes Morgan to understate the impact already made ...”

“... reform. The government met its commitments to Scotland, Wales and London and commissioned Roy Jenkins to think about electoral reform. Since then it has been downhill all the way. Electoral reform has been discarded and the ‘reform’ of the House of Lords has rarely risen above the level of farce. This hasn’t been the fault of the government ...”

“... about the postwar world with colleagues like the future Labour cabinet minister and SDP founder Roy Jenkins or the Americans Telford Taylor (later a Nuremberg prosecutor) and William Bundy (a Kennedy security adviser). Never a communist, he felt emotional solidarity with the Soviet Union as an ally and was indignant if anybody criticised Soviet actions ...”

“... the White House. Heath is the nearest thing This Blessed Plot has to a politician-hero; apart from Roy Jenkins the other heroes are the usually unsung civil servants: Lee, O’Neill, Robinson, Butler, Palliser etc, who shepherded us into the Community with a skill and persistence which almost made up for the visionless complacency of their Forties’ and ...”