“... To Oxford to vote for the chancellor, though it doesn’t seem very long since I did the same for Roy Jenkins. At Bodley I’m overtaken by A.N. Wilson, who’s brought his gown in a Sainsbury’s bag, though it’s part of Roy Jenkins’s legacy that gowns are no longer required on such occasions. This doesn’t ...”

“... the military historians tend to underplay have to be taken into account. Asquith’s biographers, Roy Jenkins and Stephen Koss, both casually assert that Asquith ‘won’ three general elections. In our modern sense, he never won one. Campbell-Bannerman was the party leader at the Liberal landslide of 1906, and Asquith’s two elections of 1910 both ...”

“... as ‘a device of dictators and demagogues’. In this she was concurring with the views of Roy Jenkins, who had himself been channelling Clement Attlee’s wartime description of referendums as not only ‘unsuitable for the British system, but indeed dangerous’. Just a few months later Thatcher reluctantly had to fight a referendum campaign to ...”

“... Sir John Day and Sir Archibald Levin Smith, both from the High Court: ‘Unionists to a man,’ as Roy Jenkins describes them in his Life of Gladstone. But what were these judges thinking of, presiding over a tribunal to which none of the ordinary rules applied, set up for a manifestly political purpose – namely, to add a veneer of judicial legitimacy ...”

“... the Bevanites’ power base in the constituency section, there was a rough logic in the situation. Roy Jenkins told Crossman in 1953 that ‘just because the Bevanites were so strong, Gaitskell was more and more forced to rely on forces such as Arthur Deakin, which made him further to the right than he would naturally be.’ Crossman reckoned that ...”

“... revenue, the company was vested in trustees. But the press as a whole had no such luck. As Simon Jenkins has reminded us, the great proprietors bought and sold their newspapers for power, prestige and, they hoped, money. The brothers Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer ...”

“... Foot lost, the unions turned him out. The day after the 1983 defeat, Moss Evans (TGWU) and Clive Jenkins (ASTMS) met and decided Foot must be replaced by Kinnock; indeed, Jenkins announced Foot’s resignation to his union executive and put out a press release to that effect. It was utterly humiliating. But in the years ...”

“... cry out against the past. They see only ugliness and failure, never success, and, like Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian last month, they seem content to throw out the baby, the bathwater, the taps, along with the reservoir supplying the taps. Jenkins is right when he says there are too many back-office staff in ...”

“... had turned into a party for 16, with the guests the likes of the American ambassador, Roy Jenkins, Kofi Annan and such. She never seemed 103 or anything like it and got up for an occasion looked magnificent. She was a generous woman, publicly and privately, and Gowrie gives an affectionate account.9 April. A dream in which a young man with ...”

“... Thomas’s, Larkin’s influence was huge; unlike Dylan Thomas’s, it persists in what Nigel Jenkins has memorably called ‘the routine shibboleths of subject-matter, imagist verisimilitude, experience-fixated “creative writing”, secular common sense and “unique voice” fetishism’. One thing the date-of-birth ordering of these anthologies ...”

“... Wilson resigned as prime minister the candidates lined up to replace him included Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey. It was, by any historical standards, an impressive cast list. The Parliamentary Labour Party made the right choice in plumping for Callaghan over the initial favourite, Healey, and the ...”

“... But although at least forty Conservative MPs were against joining the EEC, 69 Labour MPs led by Roy Jenkins were in favour. There was thus never any real risk of the government being defeated on the issue. When the decisive third reading of the European Communities Bill came in July 1972, it passed by 301 to 284 votes. Britain had finally made it into ...”

“... besides, the natural tendency of political biographers to concentrate on the political struggle. Roy Jenkins’s life gives us an entrancing account of the life of Victorian politicians: when they went to bed and got up, what they drank, what trains they took (Jenkins was a Bradshaw buff). But about what went on in ...”

“... refracted. It is a great irony that he must finally consort with cowards.Unusually for Yeats, as Roy Foster notes in his biography, the poem didn’t need many drafts. After a dream, he dictated a prose version to his wife. The poem begins with a set of clear statements, free of metaphor, tonally stark. The first stanza has assertive single-syllable words ...”

“... one who knew how to ‘manipulate perceptions’, as one of his rivals told me. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge thought he was ‘jiving’. Miles Davis called him ‘all screwed up inside’, and wrote in his autobiography that Coleman ‘just came and fucked up everybody’.Coleman wasn’t the only jazz musician on the scene who was looking for a way out of ...”