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“... by raising the case of Jaballa Matar with Gaddafi (Desmond Tutu, by contrast, did his bit). Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson are fingered too, for cosying up to the Libyans, and though David Miliband was full of goodwill, a meeting at his office ended in Seif-like smarminess. Miliband placed a hand on Matar’s shoulder and asked: ‘Are you British ...”

“... of the Thirties. Why has the Opposition done so badly? Two recent books afford a clue.* Tony Benn’s diaries are full of interest, in many ways the more so because we already have such plentiful diaristic accounts of the 1964-70 Labour Government. (Benn reveals, incidentally, that Harold Wilson promised that he would publish posthumously the real ...”

“... When historians come to account for the dégringolade of modern British politics both Tony Benn and Paul Foot will find a place: Benn as actor, Foot as an observer. The two have much in common: both were born into very similar families; both see their lives as a continuing re-education, a casting aside of cultural baggage packed with the detritus of a worn-out social system; both have come to discover a superior morality within socialism and the organised working class ...”

“... all well known, most of them had work published in the Listener and the New Statesman, and Blake Morrison calculated (in his 1980 study of the group, The Movement) that between June 1953 and July 1956 ‘there were over 240 Movement contributions to the Spectator.’ Almost immediately after the putative group identity was established, the denials and ...”

“... your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The straight-dealing Tony Blair would, they say, prefer that this was unnecessary and does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for political manipulation ...”

“... betrayal when Mandelson switched from Diet Pepsi to Diet Coke and took his support from Brown to Tony Blair, thus denying his former friend what Archer would doubtless call the greatest of all prizes. It says much about Mandelson’s self-confidence that he engaged energetically in the subsequent war – a campaign conducted with off-the-record ...”

“... only by the previous Penguin of 1962, The New Poetry, selected and introduced by A. Alvarez. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion are well aware that there is something comically factitious about the stance that has to be adopted by each new spokesman on the poetry scene – ‘we are not,’ they say, ‘the first anthologists this century to have made such a ...”

“... sounded authentic even when uttered by figures on the patrician Left such as Stafford Cripps and Tony Benn. Hazy on the finer points of Marx, and always unfamiliar with Keynes, Lansbury made the critique of capitalism intelligible: it was the gospel truth. Third, Shepherd reminds us what a rich radical heritage Lansbury’s Party bequeathed to modern ...”

“... meeting between Miss Georgia, an attractive young woman already married three times, and Kenyon Morrison, the man who will knock her down the stairs only two weeks later. The two soon flirt. But Jones, blurting out Morrison’s criminal record like a wayward judge, can’t keep quiet about him: ‘He laughed and she ...”

“... are briskly described here (it’s hard to forget that Adonis, once schools minister under Tony Blair, was himself abandoned by his mother at the age of three and brought up in care homes until he was 11), but knowledge of them increases the reader’s admiration for Bevin’s lifelong generosity of spirit. This flourished as a consequence of Bevin’s ...”

“... Lord Castlereagh and George Canning can drive from their imagination the more recent feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, accounts of which made me thankful there are no firearms stored (within easy reach) at Downing Street. Duels are now fought with shouting matches, spin doctors and snide public allusions to ‘the bloke next door’. The toxic mix of ...”

“... this was outrageous and he was going to accept the challenge of the Sunday Times. In order to kill Tony Howard’s new job he forbade any of us to speak to him. Uncharacteristically, Crossman did not follow this entry with any comment or aside, and the remainder of the six-year narrative does not include any ‘off the record’ meetings with his ...”

“... world has passed through one collective experience in the past quarter-century. Blake Morrison, while struggling gamely to relate Seamus Heaney to his and our times, cannot help but fix him eventually in his own particular place, which is in fact a substantially different matter. Tony Tanner observes suddenly ...”

“... among his protégés Hugh Gaitskell, the most impressive leader the Labour Party has ever had, and Tony Crosland, one of its two or three most important theorists. Yet none of this justifies a meticulous biography of more than seven hundred pages. Though Pimlott cannot bring himself to admit it, the truth is that, in talent and personality, Dalton never quite ...”

“... of British origins, Paul Johnson (once on the Left, then Thatcherite, now an admirer of Tony Blair), whose own celebratory history of the United States appeared in 1997. In imagining an American narrative around which a renewed progressivism could unite, Evans adopts the Popular Front model that other liberal public intellectuals are now ...”