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“... The third and final volume of the Webb diaries, which covers the period 1905 to 1924, is appropriately subtitled ‘The Power to Alter Things’. Hitherto Beatrice had been mainly the stay-at-home book-writer and social entertainer, while Sidney pursued his activities in the London County Council as well as in the London School of Economics which the Webbs had themselves founded ...”

“... and inevitable economic growth, so we didn’t really have to think about it. The predictions of Beatrice Webb, to the effect that Britain would go down in trade and wealth, that there would be a brain drain to America (on whose military strength we would become dependent), that we had too high a standard of leisure and pleasure, and that the nation as ...”

“... The final entry in Volume One of this diary, dated 23 July 1892, left Beatrice safely married to her Sidney, but lamenting that, according to current convention, as ‘Mrs Sidney Webb’ she would lose both her names. The next entry is dated 16 August and is divided between a brief reference to two delightful days of ‘real honeymoon in the Wicklow Hills’ and interviews with trade-unionists in Glasgow and elsewhere relevant to the History of Trade Unionism, which was to be their first joint book ...”

“... been lucid, splendidly persuasive though failing to persuade, but he now grew too wild for credit. Beatrice Webb, who had at first disliked him, then saw his value and took him on for life. She was always at hand to scold and restrain him, but as time went by her task became too difficult. At one important moment the influence ran the other way, when Shaw ...”

“... Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 at Standish on the edge of the Cotswolds. Her father, Richard Potter, was a well-to-do (mainly self-made) businessman to whom she was devoted. Relations with her mother seem, however, to have been uneasy: the diary mentions ‘a kind of feeling of dislike and distrust which I believe is mutual ...”

“... of the said Society and its Socialism’. What he could hardly have anticipated was that Sidney Webb would use his position as an executor to deflect most of the money away from the obvious political uses that had been intended. George Bernard Shaw’s indignant account of a subsequent meeting of the Fabian executive, at which ...”

“... never identified as a Jew, that was how he was generally seen in English upper-class circles. Even Beatrice Webb, Maisky’s close friend, wondered at one point how Ribbentrop and the Nazis ‘felt towards the stocky, ugly Jew-tartar Soviet emissary, who compares more to a shrewd businessman negotiating in a world market than to a professional ...”

“... the US Government, and abandoned her husband and at times her children to fulfil her mission; to Beatrice Webb, who eschewed sex and children for politics; to Edith Bland (the children’s writer E. Nesbit), who reluctantly enlarged her household with her husband’s mistress and illegitimate daughter; to G. B. Shaw, who played ‘Sunday husband’ to a ...”

“... ideas, and even fancied himself the son of the flamboyant Lee rather than of his wretched father; Beatrice Webb, it seems, was sure he was Lee’s son. What he certainly owed to Lee was his early knowledge of music, the principal positive educational attainment of his Dublin childhood. Other benefits were somewhat negative: his experience of performing ...”

“... of this kind reached their apotheosis in the little essay on ‘The Art of Note-Taking’ which Beatrice Webb included in My Apprenticeship (1926). It propounded the famous doctrine of ‘only one fact on one piece of paper’. In his delightful autobiography, Memories Migrating, the late John Burrow records his perplexities when this injunction was ...”

“... I can’t help it​ being “Beauty and the Beast,” ’ wrote Sidney Webb to Beatrice Potter shortly before their marriage in 1892, ‘ – if only it is not a case of Titania and Bottom!’ The courtship of this super-extraordinary pair – ‘two active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public cause,’ as H ...”

“... body and dying in order to be reborn. Whether it’s Carlyle fretting about his unruly bowels or Beatrice Webb insisting on meagre meals, Darwin protesting that anyone with a modicum of patience could have equalled his achievements, or Pater preaching pure sensation purged of feeling, there is much mortification of flesh and spirit in the texts Levine ...”

“... we’re addressed first by a tannoy then we enter your nearly Bauhaus foyer – nearly because Beatrice Webb designed its utility furniture – we look up and see a security camera on the ceiling – that’s not fair though I mean you were the last person to care about private property but you watch us like the panopticon’s warder – I keep ...”

“... Interviewed by the BBC 25 years after Herbert Spencer’s death, Beatrice Webb, who had known him well, referred to him as Darwin’s John the Baptist. Spencer would have relished the description, which is in many ways appropriate: he coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ and was responsible for popularising the term ‘evolution ...”

“... but Morgan can’t stop there: ‘The Labour Party cherishes its great partnerships – Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Douglas and Margaret Cole, the Callaghans, the Kinnocks, the Blairs. In this pantheon the touchingly loyal team of Michael and Jill may confidently be placed.’ ‘Michael and Jill’: how cosy. It seems unfair to bracket Glenys ...”