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“... If Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot had achieved Cabinet rank together in the 1960s, the United Kingdom would be in better shape now. ‘That is my truth,’ as Bevan used to say. ‘Now tell me yours.’ What have they in common, though, this leftist Gang of Three, the Englishman, the Welshman and the Scot, Bevan, his wife and his friend, all from such different backgrounds? They have similar opinions, of course: but what of their human and moral nature, their style of writing and speaking? It may be worth noting that all three are childless and parentful: all three have been devoted to Protestant Christian parents and have (to my regret) firmly rejected the faith of their fathers ...”

“... In 1957 Jennie Lee wrote a long letter, which she did not send, to her husband Aneurin Bevan, asking him to give her ‘a little self-confidence’. The end of the letter makes it clear that Lee is really talking to herself: I don’t know quite what to do for the best. Shut up and take the consequences, sit tight on the safety valve, ease things a little by small squeals that humiliate me more than they annoy you or pretend that I am being ‘unselfish’ by not asking for your co-operation, by deceiving you into believing that all is well, a sick woman needs only a few more vitamin pills and she will cease bothering about anything except weeds in her garden ...”

“... government sacking an artist, a cultural hero. In England the minister of the arts was Jennie Lee, the widow of Aneurin Bevan, and my brother and I had painted slogans around Nottingham when an incoming Tory council cancelled the building of the new Nottingham Playhouse. I went off to work on Lindsay Anderson’s if … ., cutting out the ...”

“... while always expecting them to do his will. When Tribune had the nerve to criticise him, his wife, Jennie Lee, tried to have the paper closed. In fact, the whole period now seems shrouded in sectarian madness, right down to Jennie Lee claiming that her husband had been murdered by the stress he was put under by his ...”

“... the list of entitlements to mothers and children. In 1932, he led the ILP out of the Labour Party. Jennie Lee was a fellow Scot who went with him. ‘Yes, you will be pure all right,’ Nye Bevan chided her: ‘But remember, at the price of impotency.’ Others accused Maxton of being too lazy to want government office. Brown’s summing-up, which is more ...”

“... at 105 Piccadilly is said to have changed since the days when Lord Goodman was chairman and Jennie Lee Minister for the Arts. Among the cuts advertised in The Glory of the Garden, and later implemented, was a reduction of 50 per cent in the allocation to literature, accompanied by the abolition of the Literature Department. Fifteen or so years ago ...”

“... prominent figures on the left, including Bertrand Russell, George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson and Jennie Lee: We, the undersigned, appeal to the conscience of humanity against the cruel persecution of the widowed Velia Matteotti during the eight years since her husband’s murder, a persecution which keeps her and her children under perpetual police ...”

“... Miners’ Federation, does not; the charismatic Aneurin Bevan figures (albeit for his marriage to Jennie Lee rather than his politics), but Ernest Bevin, the period’s most adept wage negotiator, does not. These men lived and breathed the politics of class: the divide between employer and worker was, for them, primordial and almost impassable; the ...”

“... British Union of Fascists; and he didn’t approve of the decision made by his soon to be wife, Jennie Lee, to stay in the ILP when it disaffiliated in 1932 (she eventually rejoined Labour, and as arts minister under Harold Wilson devised and created the Open University). Bevan’s response to her when the ILP left Labour was typically cutting, not to ...”

“... biographical essays is a joy to read. From Heinrich Heine to George Orwell, from William Lovett to Jennie Lee, Foot ranges from the prophets of the 19th century to the politicians of his own day. The enemies of promise are routed, the friends of liberty vindicated, and all with a sparkle and wit that none but A.J.P. Taylor can match. In Michael Foot’s ...”

“... it a launching push with public money. He and the men and women he worked for – Hugh Dalton, Jennie Lee, Tom Johnston, Aneurin Bevan – would know how to stop the metaphorical train’s backward slide and set it climbing again. But to what strange landscapes? For that disciplined, centralised ‘new British nation’ they created will never be ...”

“... been apprised of the inwardness of this situation when receiving unwonted support from Fred Lee. ‘If the T & G think they’re going to dictate Parliamentary policy,’ Lee had expostulated, ‘it’s time the AEU told them to get out ...’ Crossman once asked Tom O’Brien, as Chairman of the TUC, why ...”

“... by helping their fathers and husbands earn a decent ‘family wage’. Labour women MPs like Jennie Lee, first elected in a by-election in 1929, saw married women’s interests as subsumed in their husbands’ and working women’s interests as ‘sectional demands’: ‘We cannot ask for equal pay,’ she told Castle, ‘when the miners’ wages ...”

“... meant. But the generally accepted story (told, it’s true, by Chiang’s second wife, known as Jennie, whom he had discarded) suggests a different set of motives. The matchmaker was Ailing, the most astute and crafty of the sisters. She had identified Chiang as the coming ruler and was overheard remarking that he needed a new wife: she dismissed ...”

“... Lillie Mae, his broken-winged father Arch Persons, his blousy maiden aunts, Sookie and Callie and Jennie, who brought him up as a nearly-girl – he raced for the glorylands. Capote’s young life is a small, operatic cliché, a story of abandonment in a slow-burning Southern hollow, all the world held at a distance, all of a boy’s wonder clouded with local ...”