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“... I first met Tony Crosland 25 years ago, at a seminar at Nuffield College. I took an instant dislike to him. I was then a rather priggish Bevanite, and I was shocked by his politics. I was even more shocked by his manner. He seemed to typify what I most disliked about the Southern English mandarinate. He had a cut-glass accent ...”

“... Tony Crosland’s epoch-making book The Future of Socialism was published in 1956. That Roy Hattersley’s aim is to don the master’s mantle in the late 1980s is evident not only from his book’s subtitle, but also from his brief account of a conversation he had with Tony Crosland a week before the latter’s fatal stroke ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... By the mid-1940s, however, that marriage was in tatters, and although Taylor remarried (Eve Crosland) fairly soon after its formal end, he did so without illusions. By the mid-1950s, he was leading a highly compartmentalised life, spending four days a week at Magdalen (where he lived in college) and dividing the weekends in London between his new and ...”

“... but uninspired. Her civil servants liked her but thought her more a manager than a leader. Tony Crosland, her chief at education during the first Wilson government, was frustrated by her tendency to get mired in detail. Contrast this with the record of Barbara Castle, Labour’s top woman at a string of second-rank ministries a few years earlier. Like ...”

“... of true socialism. This alternative Soviet strategy puts Zaslavskaya in the camp of Tawney, Tony Crosland and Shirley Williams and the kindlier tradition of democratic socialism: ‘The task of a socialist society is to retain the advantages of centralised economic planning, while at the same time finding ways of combining it with a greater stimulation of ...”

“... stupidity. If one puts that together with the unforgettable picture of Benn which emerges from Susan Crosland’s biography of Tony Crosland – Benn ringing up at all hours with phone pranks, practical jokes, impersonations and Goon Show voices – one realises that the common strand is a good-hearted ...”