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“... Roy Jenkins rose from his chair and said: ‘Well, it’s all over, Callaghan is appointing Crosland.’ He nodded to a handwritten envelope addressed to the President of the French Republic. I knew that it contained a letter declaring his willingness to become President of the European community. We talked for a while, and I sadly conceded that my ...”

“... has no doubt at all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of ...”

“... are all, so to speak, born-again Labour revisionists – old disciples of Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland, who have spent their political lives fighting the fundamentalists on the Labour Left. Painfully, reluctantly and at different speeds, we have all been forced to recognise that that battle cannot be won inside the Labour Party: that it was an illusion to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... college in 1981. There is the frequently flaunted economic fact that there is no future in Anthony Crosland’s sort of socialism because there is no firm future for the growth which – although less unequivocally than subsequent commentators have assumed – Crosland supposed adequate public spending to ...”

“... of the mid-Sixties. In those days socialism did not feature – even in the rhetoric. True, Anthony Crosland, Benn’s mentor and former tutor, had used the word in the title of a famous book in 1956. By the time this section of diary opens, however, it had gone right out of vogue. In the run-up to its most important postwar election ...”

“... was no longer possible.’ The future of socialism – to use the phrase in which Crosland encapsulated the agenda forty years ago – thus remains essentially bound up with the future of capitalism. They are twins, often quarrelling but ultimately indispensable to each other: each shaped to an extent they are reluctant to acknowledge by their ...”

“... one Labour MP says gleefully. ‘It is a work of utter risibility. Mandelson wanted to be the new Anthony Crosland and has instead become a figure of ridicule.’ This is to underestimate not so much the literary merit, but the political seriousness of the New Labour ‘project’ delineated in the book. Despite the last-minute filleting of the text by ...”

“... At least thinkers like John Strachey tried to grapple with political theory, however, Anthony Crosland, whose The Future of Socialism came out in the same year, 1956, as Strachey’s Contemporary Capitalism and argued very much the same thing, took issue with Karl Marx. But he was quick to denounce those who wrote Marx off. ‘The man was a ...”

“... Bridget Phillipson – are instinctively hostile to public ownership. Streeting claims that Anthony Crosland ‘challenged lazy orthodoxy’ in the party. Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956) was the product of a brief period in which it was possible to conclude that the major economic problems had all ...”

“... Social Democratic Party in 1875, and like others who would not overtly align themselves with him (Anthony Benn once told an audience of Yorkshire miners that English socialists didn’t get their ideas from ‘old German books’), have equally few. The difficulty is that both exist, that neither can be said to be very exact about the possible institutional ...”

“... might actually solve the crises of housing or climate, merely his faith that such solutions exist. Anthony Crosland, to whom he gestures in the piece, was at least a master of detail. In his technological fixation Blair resembles no one in modern politics so much as Dominic Cummings, though Cummings understands that technology intensifies, rather than ...”

“... of the post-war mixed economy: from the system anatomised by Andrew Shonfield, celebrated by Anthony Crosland and managed, with diminishing success, by the governments of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. For that system never got beyond ‘belligerent co-existence’. A jealous political class, imbued with the preconceptions of parliamentary ...”

“... curbing the social services, and controlling the trade unions, fell to Wilson and Callaghan. Anthony Crosland, the leading theorist of social democracy, served notice of a new order: ‘The party’s over.’ The headlines since then have been a record of almost unrelieved bad news for Labour. The destruction by Harold Wilson of Tony Benn’s ...”

“... Brown. Much the same happens with work by non-politicians. Two very good non-extremist studies, Anthony Quinton’s The Politics of Imperfection and Noel O’Sullivan’s Conservatism, appear, but they are almost alone. Norton and Aughey’s Conservatives and Conservatism is well beyond Honderich’s ken. Even Lord Coleraine’s right-wing For Conservatives ...”