Search Results

“... out on 5 January, and those who are still hard at it on 31 December. We are surely fortunate that Barbara Castle – like the late Dick Crossman – is in the second category. And when Mrs Castle keeps a diary, she doesn’t mess about: she really keeps a diary. The indefatigability of her labours was first revealed ...”

“... Barbara Castle’s diary of the period 1974-76 shows more about the nature of cabinet government – even though it deals with only one Cabinet – than any previous publication, academic, political or biographical. It is, I think, better than Crossman. It gives a greater impression of immediacy; as a result, it is compulsive reading; and although I have made no checks, and it recounts many events of which I had no direct knowledge, it seems to me to be as accurate as one can expect of so personal a record ...”

“... if so, where did it go? The easy answer, implicit in many contributions, is ‘into feminism’. Barbara Castle, Labour MP for Blackburn from 1945 to 1979, has a different one. In 1960 she was 50, and had decided that she possessed a mind as well as a vagina. Sex was ‘a powerful, creative and potentially disruptive force’, but one whose domination ...”

“... as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts. Yet both were writing with the special excitement of socialist voyeurs. Determined to expose the secrets of Whitehall while the story ...”

“... until midnight, it hosted meetings addressed not just by usual suspects such as Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Kenneth Tynan, the publisher John Calder, Doris Lessing, Michael Redgrave and Wolf Mankowitz, but also such distinguished figures as William Empson. ‘Events’ were held in the basement where various tendencies including ‘skiffle, trad ...”

“... Kinnock technique) when Wilson’s Government, despite the presence in high office of Crossman and Barbara Castle, proved a disappointment. (The pirating of Bevan’s phrase ‘In place of fear’ for Barbara Castle’s industrial relations White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ was for many the last straw.) As ...”

“... When Barbara Castle told Harold Wilson that renegotiating Britain’s membership of Europe would end in ‘a messy middle-of-the-road muddle’, Wilson replied that he felt ‘at his best in a messy middle-of-the-road muddle’. This from Wilson’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler. Wilson had one or two good jokes, unlike Callaghan or poor Attlee, so often the butt of other people’s ...”

“... assorted mob from the wider Labour movement: a constellation of leftist Bevanite MPs including Barbara Castle, accompanied by MPs from the pro-American right of the party and assorted trade unionists (some of them ‘allegedly quite ignorant freeloaders’, as Wright puts it, others equally ignorant fellow-travellers, and a few who remained shrewd and ...”

“... rights for women and so on, they were often reluctant to be ‘cast in the feminist role’, as Barbara Castle put it. Class had always been the primary determinant of Labour Party policy: you improved the position of women by helping their class, and you did that chiefly by helping their fathers and husbands earn a decent ‘family wage’. Labour ...”

“... single-parenthood was an achievement indeed – an achievement which Romero curiously underrates. Barbara Castle is more perceptive here, describing the book as ‘massive, detailed, vivid and highly subjective’, and as bristling ‘with facts, personal emotions and shrewd political analysis’. This raises the question of whether good biography can ...”

“... down and reach for relief to the two diarist-contemporaries of Callaghan, Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle. Their less solid and perhaps even less accurate accounts are made so much more readable by the authors’ (perhaps unconscious) admissions of their own weaknesses. Sunny Jim plods cautiously on through his long and distinguished political ...”

“... classless style. But she does not have that extra dimension, obvious for example in people like Barbara Castle or Shirley Williams as ministers, of being a warm personality in an essentially male environment.’ Certainly a personality does come across in these pages. Our PM clearly has both mental and physical courage (witness her visit to Armagh) and ...”

“... number of female MPs. Since the war there has always been a handful of formidable female MPs – Barbara Castle, Bessie Braddock, Margaret Thatcher, Gwyneth Dunwoody – but never enough to change the boys’ club culture. It was not until the Blair revolution of 1997, which saw the election of 101 Labour women, that the tide began to turn. Since then ...”

“... de Gaulle was right after all, we are not ready for the Common Market, not on the A2 anyway.’ Barbara Castle, Labour’s minister for transport in the late 1960s, had refused to yield to Kentish requests that the M2 be extended all the way to Dover, but the bypasses were on the way by 28 June 1973, when the conservative MP for Canterbury, David ...”

“... often in lockable, leather-bound volumes. He generated even more words than Dick Cross-man and Barbara Castle, so many that the work of selection and editorship has been too much for him to attempt alone. He has therefore always relied on an academic editor. Unlike Addison, he has not apparently exercised editorial control over the selection, nor have ...”