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“... An Englishman addressing himself to Irish history and contemporary politics ought always to bear in mind John Stuart Mill’s provocative remark, that it was not Ireland but England that was the exception: ‘Ireland is in the mainstream of human existence and human feeling and experience; it is England that is one of the lateral channels.’ Of the authors under discussion, the first is an Englishman who, in The Offshore Islanders, has anatomised just that lateral channel, the second an Anglo-American journalist, the third a leading Irish politician and writer of uniquely varied experience, and the last the broadcaster and historian reponsible for the current remarkable television series on Ireland ...”

“... Commemorative pieces tend to be pious rather than memorable, omitting or evading growing pains or the clashes of personality endemic in any institution. Some sections of this short collection of essays by past or present PEP workers are little more than catalogues of worthy research projects. But PEP (since its merger in 1978, now the Policy Studies Institute) has rarely been flatulent or woolly-minded, and the contributors, not always intentionally, reveal quite a lot about a characteristic institution of the 20th-century British political élite ...”

“... This volume marks an extension of Mr Irving’s historiography: indeed, its critical reception has already provoked him to reply (in the New Statesman, 8 May) that he sees himself as ‘dedicated to the Augean task of revising modern history’. There are, of course, similarities with his earlier work: the vast mass of detail, painstakingly gathered from an impressive range of oral and written sources (although the rewards are rarely commensurate with the amount of energy used up); the same idiosyncratic use of evidence, as he proceeds from quite minor discoveries to challenging generalisations; and the same bewildering mixture of detailed narrative garnished with reported speech and snippets of broad analysis ...”

“... In the six months since Neal Ascherson’s intricate but lucid account of the rise of Solidarity was finished, Poland’s affairs have become the latest world-heroic saga. While the climax, Soviet invasion, seems to have been replaced by General Jaruzelski’s quite unforeseen takeover, myth has already taken on the force of history, and two themes are now becoming established: that the ‘extremists’ in Solidarity overplayed their hands, thereby challenging the Soviet Union’s interest in a friendly Poland; and that by inducing Jaruzelski to move, Moscow invaded by proxy ...”

“... to a permanent, structural revision of the political orientation of these parties. The comments of Keith Middlemas on the class composition of the mass CPs of the West (a matter given little attention in the otherwise interesting chapters of Kindersley’s collection) must be treated with particular seriousness in relation to the Spanish party. The PCE ...”

“... Thirty years ago, as Keith Middlemas reminds us in his messy, but important and sometimes brilliant new book,* Britain served as the model for the reconstruction of European democracy. Not only the British themselves, but their Continental neighbours, took it for granted that the secret of ordered freedom had been learned more successfully here than anywhere else, and that that secret had been encapsulated in the British version of parliamentary government ...”

“... In the second, we now have a significant scholarly literature on the Sixties and Seventies. Keith Middlemas, for example, has completed his remarkable study of Britain’s post-war political economy (a remarkable study even if the conclusions the reader draws from this mass of material are – as in my case – not always Professor ...”

“... at GCHQ has provoked the eventual rupture. In what is effectively an official history of NEDC, Keith Middlemas is anxious to assert its virtues: a vehicle for the pursuit of consensus, the Council ‘has stood for steady, reasoned adjustment to national and international long-term trends, as against the oscillating, hasty patterns and reversals of ...”

“... to be found on the right, among economic liberals of the school of Hayek, whose influence, via Sir Keith Joseph and Milton Friedman, has produced the astonishing spectacle of a British Conservative leadership acting more dogmatically and ideologically, and more precipitately, than any Labour government has ever done. Two favourable reviewers of my recent ...”

“... years. When Crosland was writing, Britain was far from immune to balance-of-payments crises – as Keith Middlemas’s book amply documents. Nevertheless, manufactured imports were equivalent to a much smaller proportion of the GDP than they are today, and were subject to greater restrictions; exchange controls were still extensive; and Euro-markets were ...”

“... Party, policy-making was delegated to committees, which were rarely temples of high-mindedness. Keith Middlemas described the politics of industrial society as a battle of economic interests – capital and labour – that became bureaucratised and accommodated within the processes and institutions of government. Parties appealed to voters mostly in ...”

“... Service to bear, notably on the way in which Whitehall was ‘de-privileged’ under Thatcher. Keith Middlemas, an authority on the corporate institutions with which the 20th-century state has become imbricated, writes lucidly on the party’s relations with industry and the City, making the valid point that these have often been more problematic than ...”

“... British interests and German interests were on a collision course. As the biographers of Baldwin, Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, observed, ‘the government had awakened to a danger that had nothing to do with any question of marriage.’ Charles Higham quotes an FBI file in Washington: ‘Certain would-be state secrets were passed on to Edward, and ...”

“... and strangely zestful guide through the institutional maze and informal log-rolling of the Union, Keith Middlemas looks out on a somewhat broader scene. Europe, he suggests, is surrounded by an arc of potential threat curving from Murmansk to Casablanca. To hold it at a distance, the Union needs a belt of insulation, comprising a ‘second circle’ of ...”

“... It was a recipe for encouraging extremism in all directions; within the Cabinet itself, it set Sir Keith Joseph and Mrs Thatcher to dreaming of what might have been achieved but for weakness of will and a tendency to U-turns; in the country it made the most moderate union leaders wonder what they might get by flexing their muscles. The Government failed to get ...”