“... experience of James Callaghan on Devolution, Ted Heath on the miners and Michael McGahey, Harold Wilson on Rhodesia and Harold Macmillan on Profumo, occupants of 10 Downing Street can come to see the world in highly personal and in gladiatorial terms. It may have been the personalised nature of the conflict ...”

“... MI5 used their enormous irresponsible powers against the elected government of the day; and that Harold Wilson, author of the famous phrase ‘tightly-knit group of politically-motivated men’, was the victim of just such a group in his own intelligence services – that the Establishment in one great shout cried ‘Halt.’ Wright himself became a ...”

“... quality of life, not instruments of death. Mindful of a vague promise in the election manifesto, Harold Wilson has invited Dr Serafin, a Russian-born Oxford philosopher, to mull over the question and take a long view. Unfortunately, domestic exigencies prevent her from hearing a vital part of the PM’s call and, confused about her terms of ...”

“... When a heckler shouted ‘nigger lover’ at him, he retorted angrily that he was no such thing. Harold Wilson, the new Labour Prime Minister, denounced the young MP from Smethwick as a ‘Parliamentary leper’, and before long Griffiths was drowned in the full Labour tide of 1966. But even before the 1966 election, the Labour Party had turned the ...”

“... incredible as it seems in retrospect – that he would save the Party by leading a putsch against Harold Wilson. Then came the 1970 election defeat, and the Common Market split. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that a Croslandite revisionist was logically bound to support entry into the Community: that the xenophobia and Little Englandism ...”

“... for instance, that on the day that Andrew Newton’s trial for shooting the dog opened at Exeter, Harold Wilson announced his resignation and Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon announced their separation. Here, and in other passages of the same sort, he is trying to tell me something by waggling his eyebrows. I have attempted not to be ...”

“... House, was far from popular with his Northern MPs for giving the Bill Parliamentary time. As for Harold Wilson, he hated the whole issue and was angry with Crossman for not getting it out of the way quickly enough. In 1967, two years after Lord Arran’s original intervention, the Bill approached its Third Reading. The only time the Government would ...”

“... in getting Labour into power after 13 years of Tory Government. (She didn’t think much of Wilson’s lot, especially that ‘ugly’ George Wigg, the one ‘with the ear of Harold Wilson’ who, in addition to being apparently genetically modified, she ‘always thought looked like a pervert’). She has a ...”

“... apparent success of the Grapple tests and the Soviet sputnik launches in autumn 1957, all helped Harold Macmillan to persuade President Eisenhower that it would be wise to resume the wartime collaboration on nuclear weapons. For this to happen, however, the US had to amend the McMahon Act. As a step in this direction Eisenhower and Macmillan authorised on 24 ...”

“... it could be taken for granted that Socialist dons would no more veto an honour for Edward Heath or Harold Macmillan than Tory dons would veto Harold Wilson. Even Michael Foot might have slipped through as a representative of the old order, a Thirties-ish, literary champion of the supremacy of Parliament, who caused ...”

“... to remould her party in her own image, all made it necessary to denigrate Heath as much as Wilson. Now that she in turn is gone to an unquiet political grave, and is in turn held at arm’s length by Major, how is the recent history of the Conservative Party to be written and rewritten? John Campbell’s biography addresses this question with admirable ...”

“... Kissinger’s ‘explosive’ reaction to Britain’s intention to withdraw from its bases forced Harold Wilson to stay his hand; and Diego Garcia, where a whole island was cleared of its inhabitants to satisfy the needs of American intelligence. As for GCHQ itself, one of the effects of its alliance with the National Security Agency was to focus its ...”

“... fame and fortune as a biographer: Pimlott’s achievement was to make the lives of Hugh Dalton and Harold Wilson – two Labour politicians with flawed personalities and flyblown reputations – into the stuff of compelling biography. Orwell once claimed that everything he wrote had a socialist purpose. It could almost be said of Pimlott that everything ...”

“... a tender offer. It was not considered fair play at the time, and as the then prime minister Harold Macmillan suggested, the contest was ‘rather a “Gentlemen v. Players” affair’ – in which the professionals, as so often, won. The deal brought Warburg into the public eye for the first time, and although he was condemned by the bigwigs of the ...”

“... further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo always had going for him as ...”