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“... My favourite memory of Roy Jenkins dates from a golden July evening during the Warrington by-election. He is standing in the front garden of a council house, deep in conversation with an elderly Labour housewife, for whose support he is canvassing. Stooping slightly, and with a courtly gravitas that would not have seemed out of place at a European Summit, he is explaining why the ‘fluctooations’ which have characterised British economic policy for the last ten years have done so much damage to our international credit ...”

“... This book contains reflections on both history and theory, and is written with David Marquand’s usual elegance and intelligence. Its 19 essays concern themes familiar to readers of his biography of Ramsay MacDonald and his distinguished study, The Unprincipled Society: how can we devise for modern Britain an appropriate ‘social democratic’ theory of social action, and how can we construct a ‘progressive’ coalition which might give it adequate electoral support ...”

“... idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one thing, they cast light on the hopes and fears most of us entertain in the face of government activity of all sorts. Realists who ...”

“... when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought? Much of David Marquand’s powerful essay about ‘Britain, now’ is an elegy for a lost past, unsullied by ‘masterless capitalism’, a sad story of the light growing dim, good running to bad, the public realm hollowed out by vested interests, greed and ...”

“... Government. All this may be familiar and even obvious. But it is not seen as quite so obvious by David Marquand, whose newly-published The Unprincipled Society* tells the history of 20th-century Britain in terms of the rise and fall of a ‘Keynesian’ consensus in which, for a few short, happy years, the unions collaborated with everybody else in ...”

“... But his development of this appeal to recent history does not turn out very happily. He cites David Marquand as an influential exponent of the view that Britain’s cultural conservatism in the 20th century was the result of an ossification of the values of liberal capitalist individualism which had served their turn and had had their day. ‘Such a ...”

“... a radical departure from the way we have traditionally viewed our reciprocal relationships. David Marquand, in what is properly the opening essay of the book, argues that hitherto the Left has been possessed by the same ‘reductionist individualism’ as the Right. The result was a ‘paradox’: social democracy could exist only within ...”

“... have made our problems worse. A.H. Halsey and Brian Barry in their essay in the Skidelsky, and David Marquand in his, take this on, seeking to identify collective actions and provisions that can mitigate the worst effects of the free market. By denying, in a chillingly offguard moment, the very existence of such a thing as society, she has at least ...”

“... thus a belief in the continued viability of the pits – to function at all. Francis Beckett and David Hencke quote one journalist’s description of a mining village near Barnsley: The village is not big, nearly all the 300 workers in the pit live here with their families. The wages were never very high … but they have cars and many own their little ...”

“... even if (as I suggested a few weeks ago) there was not then the degree of national consensus which David Marquand, in The Unprincipled Society, would have us believe, there was at any rate full employment, or as near to it as a liberal-democratic capitalist society is ever going to get. But just as, in the Thirties, the failure of the previous Labour ...”

“... for New Times’ – a general political statement or programme – and a fable for the 1990s by David Edgar. The book is long, and since several contributors are responsible for more than one essay, there is a good deal of repetition. Tighter editorial control would have done no harm, though that might have been construed as inhibiting the openness of the ...”

“... an attempt to steer the party away from socialism – the attempt on which William Rodgers and David Owen seem to be embarked, and which has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable ...”

“... he didn’t credit the men and women he met in the East End – ‘a subservient lot’, he told David Marquand years later – with his conversion to socialism. That may have already been underway but would be shaped by his work teaching in the industrial north.His quarrel with Oxford in a sense drove him there. In 1905, Tawney joined the newly formed ...”

“... Governments risk being taken to court. All this is part of the story unfolded by Davids Butler and Marquand in their masterly and absorbing analysis. In 1979, preparing the European Community’s budget for the following year, the Brussels Commission tried to curb the outlay on farm support and earmark more money for new industries and jobs. The Governments ...”

“... virtues, however, Austen Morgan diverges less from the standard biography (published in 1977 by David Marquand, now of the Social Democratic Party) than his Marxian perspectives might lead one to expect; he does not even put the case of MacDonald’s critics when he decided on a strategy of respectability on taking office in 1924. What he has done is ...”