Search Results

“... Give me chastity and continence, prayed the youthful Augustine, but do not give it yet. Perhaps the young Tony Benn, slithering up the greasy poll, made similar entreaties. For this, his fascinating first volume of diaries, is the story of an attractive, vital, boundlessly energetic young man having the egocentric time of his life without a thought for the morrow, except to move onwards and upwards ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for 30 and a member of the Labour Party National Executive for 25. In the Thirties, as Ben Pimlott shows in this absorbing, perceptive and sometimes moving biography, he played a central part (after Bevin, the central part) in dragging the Labour Party out of the semi-pacifist isolationism of the Twenties into a grudging acceptance of ...”

“... to be a right-wing ideological hegemony. The contributors to Samizdat, whose founding editor, Ben Pimlott, is one of the editors of this book, were adherents of the Labour Party, the old Alliance, the Communist Party and of no party at all. Many of the contributors still are these things, though some, like Michael Young, have returned to the Labour ...”

“... scope for compromise between them. Prominent among the sceptics is the historian and biographer Ben Pimlott, whose Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks is a selection from his prolific writings as an essayist and reviewer. It is not unusual in Britain for a historian to win fame and fortune as a biographer: Pimlott’s ...”

“... the shell. That we are now in possession of the real Dr Dalton is due entirely to the labours of Ben Pimlott, whose superlative biography was published last year. Dalton was a compulsive diarist who started a journal in 1916 and carried on until 1960. Dr Pimlott has been editing it in two volumes, the first of which ...”

“... Council was formed. ‘While the LCC area had some continuing claim to reality as “London”,’ Ben Pimlott and Nirmala Rao write, ‘the Greater London area would be a constellation of competing communities. However, there was no longer a premium on the kind of identity of interest or community that was arguably a characteristic of the doomed ...”

“... came to prefer her second name, Mary) was somewhat bemused, particularly since Harold, already, in Pimlott’s words, ‘cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself and confidently planning the future’, went on to tell Gladys that he intended to become an MP and, ultimately, prime minister. For these were things he had more or less been promising himself ...”

“... consciousness all along. Three of the works under review – Barry Hindess’s essay in the Pimlott and Cook volume, and the books by Sabel and Crouch – are valuable simply for their critique of the ways in which both Marxist and mainstream sociologies of work condescend to workers’ capacity to know and defend their own interests. Crouch sets out to ...”

“... Parliamentary Socialism that the Labour Party never really had been socialist; much more recently, Ben Pimlott, in Labour and the Left in the 1930s, has argued that attacks on Labour for abandoning its socialism are misplaced, since the original and basic purpose of the Party was simply to get working men into Parliament. In essence, ...”

“... about the income which sustained the first seven years of her administration, but the fact that Ben Pimlott, Philip Ziegler and Austen Morgan, three heavyweight biographers of Harold Wilson, under whose premiership the petroleum exploitation and taxation regime was set up, fail to mention it. In Scotland, up until the Eighties, we had contrived an ...”

“... confidence in him and the peculiar demands of a nation at war, George VI was not what Ben Pimlott has called a ‘cypher-monarch’. Rhodes James’s brief as an apologist is fairly evident. There’s never any doubt that the Duke of Windsor was unfit for the position he abdicated; and no criticism of George VI, however trivial, goes ...”

“... was still an unknown backbencher and Gaitskell a university lecturer. As the latest instalment of Ben Pimlott’s magisterial edition of Hugh Dalton’s diaries reminds us, the current leadership’s dismay at the vagaries of the ‘loony Left’ has plenty of precedents from earlier days. To take an example almost at random, here is Dalton on a meeting ...”

“... by the prime minister, his reaction could be very violent indeed.’ As Clive Ponting and Ben Pimlott have demonstrated, Britain’s defence policy east of Suez and its economic policies were both adjusted as a result of US financial pressure; yet Dean reckoned that support for the US in Vietnam was more important to the president. In June ...”

“... chair, would write a far more interesting profile than the average political editor. Ben Pimlott, in his brilliant biography of Hugh Dalton, caught the character of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer with great assurance. And, more recently, Robert Rhodes James discovered the roots of Anthony Eden’s vulnerability better than any ...”