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“... This addition to the publisher’s ‘Modern Governments’ series is essentially a textbook for students, but it can be recommended to the general reader also as a well-informed and well-written guide to the constitution, the apparatus of government, Parliament, the political parties and the pressure groups. The expert on particular aspects of the subject would not look to a work of this kind in order to add to his knowledge: but he won’t find his expertise offended ...”

“... The 1983-84 series of Reith Lectures was given by Sir Douglas Wass, who retired from the Civil Service in March 1983. He had served in the Treasury since 1946, and had been Permanent Secretary to the Treasury since 1974. The task which he set himself in the lectures was to examine the efficiency and responsiveness of central government in Britain. Knowing that it can be quite hard to find anything weighty enough to put into a single memorial lecture, my first reaction was to wonder whether there are enough subjects of general interest, and a sufficient supply of people with something new and important to say about them, to warrant a whole series of broadcast lectures every year ...”

“... variety of reaction which accommodates itself to revolutions. In Getting and Spending, Sir Leo Pliatzky has a throw-away line to the effect that in the circumstances of 1979 ‘something around 40 per cent would have been about right as a ceiling on the proportion of GDP going to public expenditure’. And this from a former head of the public ...”

“... life insurance companies into industry, and although it endorses the point that Joel Barnett and Leo Pliatzky have made, that decisions on spending and decisions on the budget should not be as separate as they have been in the past, it proposes nothing specific for the future of the Treasury itself. That, at a moment when this department is more ...”

“... of quangos. It is now a very long time since the Report on Non-Departmental Public Bodies by Sir Leo Pliatzky was welcomed by the newly appointed Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher on account of its scathing attack on the quango culture in modern Britain. A recent report put the amount of public money disbursed by such bodies after 15 years of Tory rule at ...”