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“... of my 21st birthday. The guests included Norman Cameron and Tom Driberg, now both dead, and ‘Michael Innes’, still alive. We had dinner in a private room at the George restaurant, now also dead. Halfway through dinner the waiter asked to speaks to me in private. Then he said: ‘I am a respectable married man and if that gentleman comes out again I ...”

“... in the morning until midnight, it hosted meetings addressed not just by usual suspects such as Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Kenneth Tynan, the publisher John Calder, Doris Lessing, Michael Redgrave and Wolf Mankowitz, but also such distinguished figures as William Empson. ‘Events’ were held in the basement ...”

“... had ceased to exist long ago. Not at all. Mrs Thatcher wants to create eight or nine more peers. Michael Foot, as a final gesture of leadership, wants to create 29. What can be the explanation of this extraordinary demand? Once upon a time the Leader of the Labour movement was solid against the House of Lords. Can you imagine Keir Hardie as a peer? When ...”

“... when Parliament was sitting, I believe there might have been a different gut reaction. Once Michael Foot had struck an attitude, ‘loyalty to Michael’ became an element in a situation where the notion of actual gunfire in the South Atlantic was surrealist fantasy. People had some vague scenario, at worst, of a ...”

“... Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached to the habits and training of an academic milieu without ever forgetting that it was as an ...”

“... the Party took up at Blackpool last October will not be changed in any fundamental way and that Michael Foot and Denis Healey will therefore have to fight the next election on a programme closer to the French Communist Party’s than to that of any other important working-class party in the Western world. Labour has been losing support since the early ...”

“... learn that several of Vidal’s hours here have been spent discussing Montaigne (so he said) with Michael Foot. Sadly, when Vidal showed up on one of Newsnight’s election panels, Jeremy Paxman failed to cut him down to size. In fact, he didn’t even try. Vidal was allowed to preen himself at leisure. Next to him, the two British panellists – Lord ...”

“... prospective Parliamentary candidate, Peter Tatchell. The extraordinary renunciation of Tatchell by Michael Foot on the floor of the House of Commons last November was one of the most striking episodes in the recent progress of the Labour Party. Foot’s late laying down of arms in the War of Tatchell’s Candidacy ...”

“... theme, and it is not just Benn himself who is drawn to the flame. Eric Heffer, Audrey Wise, Michael Meacher, Ken Livingstone and others feature in earnest discussions about whether the time is right for another attempt to capture the flag and how the forces are assembled. The votes of the unions and the membership seem to allow the possibility that the ...”

“... They have a duty to the Queen.’ After Wilson’s resignation, the Director-General of MI5 Sir Michael Hanley told his assembled colleagues that if Michael Foot was elected leader of the Labour Party (and thus became prime minister), ‘I and every other officer in the service would have to consider our ...”

“... we see the politics of the Sixties more from the point of view of Richard Crossman than, say, of Michael Stewart, the reason is that Crossman kept a diary and Stewart did not. Nevertheless, the possibility of publication is seldom the only reason for keeping a diary. Like any habit that becomes addictive, diary-writing has its effect on the life of the ...”

“... simple remedies and evangelical tone. But her confident certainties are echoed on the other side: Michael Foot condemns her for praising Victorian values ‘without even a passing comprehension of the human suffering and indignity which the mass of our people had to endure in that pre-democratic age’. The term ‘Victorian’ is used purely ...”

“... in an era of multi-party democracy. Mrs Thatcher had been eighteen months in Downing Street, and Michael Foot had become the Labour leader three months before. Britain was being pulled apart by ideology and extremism. We would draw into politics people of talent and good will – the ‘political virgins’ – who were alienated by the dogmatism and ...”

“... necessary, since most of the politicians looked like T.S. Eliot and most of the poets looked like Michael Foot – with Mary Wilson as one of the exceptions. Although I warned the heroine of Mrs Wilson’s Diary that I was a journalist, she favoured me with her political opinions (sound, I thought, if unorthodox) and I changed the subject, asking if she ...”

“... despised the very notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony ...”