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“... assumption that we can largely agree on everything; or that people with whom we do not agree, like Tony Benn or Roy Hattersley, are people whom history has passed by. It’s a view that leaves New Labour with no explanation for the magnitude of its victory in 1997. That was a very strong expression of grievance (as well as exasperation with Tory ...”

“... of Parliament, who caused offence mainly by mistaking the Cenotaph for the Aldermaston March. But Tony Benn of Westminster School and New College? Not on your life. One of the ironies of the whole episode was that the Iron Lady’s champions appealed to a set of conventions that she had done more than any other British politician to consign to the ...”

“... of British politics – from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided ...”

“... in residence in the House of Commons that night: the only inhabitant of the place, and a woman. (Tony Benn, hailing her a heroic campaigner for liberty, had a plaque raised to her in 1999 in the very cupboard.) This adventure, clever and significant and doubtless very uncomfortable, resembles, in its verve and imagination, the attempt to put the ...”

“... be as clear about the thoughts we could not have as about those we could. It was good, he said of Tony Benn, that one should be reminded of worthy ends, less good to suppose that by looking zealous enough about these ends one could make the conflicts between them go away. And it was important to recognise where argument had to stop. If opponents can’t ...”

“... diaries of curates and Edwardian ladies; prisoners of conscience; Anaïs Nin; Richard Crossman; Tony Benn; Alan Bennett. But on the whole, no. And yet we can’t stop ourselves. These days, if you’re a young writer and you don’t do your own weblog you’re something of an exception, and even for the amateur, the ‘journaler’, there’s now a ...”

“... militant demands for party democracy from sections of the Labour membership, fomented by Tony Benn, pulled the party leftwards, and Jack Jones found that the shop-stewards’ movement ran counter to his realisation that a national framework for wage settlements was necessary. The tensions that had run through politics and industrial relations ...”

“... was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ‘authors’ being Tony Benn, Stan Orme and Denis Healey. One is tempted to say that even in the MI5 officers’ mess, the idea of Denis Healey collaborating with Messrs Benn and Orme on anything at all must surely have required the ...”

“... of defence. Evil men are crawling forward, determined to tear up the weedy old turf. Scargill, Benn, Ken Livingstone, even the pathetic Peter Tatchell, are harassed and hounded with a venom and persistence which have no justification and no precedent. Well, perhaps one precedent. When the right-wing press launched the New Bullying some ten years ago by ...”

“... Inevitably,​ the first thing I did when I got my copy of the one-volume edition of The Benn Diaries (Hutchinson, £30) was to look up Jeremy Corbyn in the index. He appears about as often as you’d expect, 15 times in total, scattered at regular intervals across 24 years, from 1983 until 2007. (The diaries end in 2009, five years before Benn’s death ...”

“... diaries to equal the extraordinary raw material supplied by Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn for the delectation of students of government. The best explanation for this party discrepancy I have hit on is that whereas all people of the right enter politics to exercise power, at least some people of the left are as fascinated by how they do ...”

“... has puzzled British radicals for two centuries – from Paine to Cobden, from Bertrand Russell to Tony Benn. Hugh Cunningham’s The Volunteer Force (1975) clearly revealed the Mid-Victorian popularity of mobilising in national self-defence, and if modern British social historians had been less sympathetic to the Left, or if Conservative historians had ...”

“... to a point they do succeed in this, for there are no obvious inconsistencies in what they say; and Tony Benn, of course, makes no appearance in these pages except when quoted by Mr Silkin in praise of Labour’s achievements through Parliament since 1945. Yet the Opposition surely has to do two things. It must convince the electorate that the economic ...”

“... studies proper were up and running. But it is also the impatience of one who, just as much as Tony Benn, came to traditional working-class values from the outside. To romanticise those values, or write them off as drearily passé, are sides of the same coin. There is a difference between being au fait and being à la mode, which Hall has not always ...”

“... would give him a superficial affinity to that line of elected reps, from Winston Churchill to Tony Benn, for whom, at times, eloquence and historical self-consciousness have seemed ends in themselves. Yet there is another less exalted political figure the mayor recalls: Alastair Campbell. A journalist like Johnson, Campbell tried to shorten the old ...”