“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to such groups as James Maxton’s ILP (before it gave up on the Labour Party and disaffiliated), Tony Benn and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, and Bevan and his Bevanites. This elicits the slightly alarming thought that if Bevan had ever become leader, he might have turned out to be as blustering and ineffectual as Kinnock himself. Perhaps ...”

“... difference between managing a company that makes marmalade and managing Network Rail.’ He quotes Tony Benn, looking back on the turmoil at BL’s Longbridge plant: ‘And then you bring in managers from a business studies course who’d got a degree in business management but who couldn’t mend a puncture in a motor tyre – and you speak about the ...”

“... on right-wing figures like Enoch Powell and Lord Hailsham and co-opting left-wing outliers like Tony Benn, Eric Hobsbawm, Arthur Scargill, John Pilger and Stuart Hall. She set about coaxing – and sometimes wrestling – as much emotion and revelation from her castaways as she could, using the unthreatening stimulus of music, and the intimacy created ...”

“... is seductive. As she says, ‘ministers of governments of all shades, energy ministers such as Tony Benn and Peter Walker, civil servants, employees of public utilities, have sat, like Jonson’s Puritans, open-mouthed and bemused, listening to the flood of jargon which has promised that the millennium is just around the corner. Billions of pounds of ...”

“... up adversaries. Here he employs his naive questioning against friends – patients, doctors, Tony Benn – as a way of making himself look buffoonish. His persona is that of an American wide-eyed with amazement at socialised healthcare. ‘Where’s the bread and the milk and the candy and the detergent?’ he asks a British pharmacist. ‘How do ...”

“... she had left office, Nicholas Henderson, her ambassador in Washington between 1979 and 1982, told Tony Benn: ‘If I reported to you what Mrs Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations.’ Few people reading this, it can be safely assumed, deeply admired Margaret Thatcher or have warm memories of her. But I ...”

“... 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 on his party by forces outside it. Thatcherism has of course ...”

“... Why is Tony Crosland one of the few Old Labour heroes that nobody mocks? Keir Hardie, G.D.H. Cole, Stafford Cripps, Gaitskell, even Nye Bevan, have become the subject of New Labour locker-room ribaldry. Yet to describe yourself as a ‘Crosland socialist’ still carries meaning. Maybe it is because of that sardonic smile, and an uneasy feeling that, if he were alive today, he would be doing the mocking ...”

“... The Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s were almost equally antagonistic to the BBC, with Tony Benn ‘equating it with the medieval Catholic Church, controlling thought from a middle-class, establishment position’. Harold Wilson, naturally given to suspicion, thought the BBC was somehow conspiring against him, and in the mid-1970s suggested ...”

“... characters were recognisable as an amalgam of the passing generation of Labour heavyweights, from Benn himself to Barbara Castle and bruisers like Denis Healey and Eric Heffer. Its atmosphere derived from the lurid tales of spookery and skulduggery that emerged in the dying days of Harold Wilson’s premiership, when the longstanding suspicion that Wilson was ...”

“... him.Despite MPs’ fears that Corbyn would democratise the party in the manner once envisioned by Tony Benn – compulsory reselection of MPs and so on – the leadership’s embrace of the new members was lukewarm. Little effort was made to convert members on paper into active participants, and party headquarters didn’t try very hard to find out who ...”

“... sensibly ask is ‘How to be a mother at all?’ This, in any case, is the point at which Melissa Benn picks up the story – and on which her ‘new politics of motherhood’ is pinned. For Benn, all mothers are working mothers: the mother who doesn’t work is an anachronism, representative, ‘like the miner or ...”

“... American data could not effectively commercialise their technology without American approval. Tony Benn – then minister of technology in Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ administration – both marvelled and chafed at these arrangements. In November 1968, after a meeting with UK Atomic Energy Agency officials, he wrote in his diary:What came out ...”