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“... memorable characters in A Dance to the Music of Time are the miners and bankers with whom Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, serves during the war, or the literary down-and-outs with whom he mingles after it; a large part of the value of the work is that it encompasses Lady Huntercombe’s dance, as well as the vissicitudes of the small magazine Fission, the ...”

“... recruited through provincial grammar schools. When Denis Healey encountered Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins at Balliol just before the Second World War, such was their tryst with destiny. This was in Healey’s Communist phase, which lasted until the fall of France. When the Marxist-dominated Labour Club split in 1940, he opposed ...”

“... soft left in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Now he vaulted over it and challenged not only Roy Jenkins, the old Gaitskellite, but also Michael Foot, the old Bevanite, for the deputy leadership in 1971. The fathers of the other two candidates had been, respectively, a Labour and a Liberal MP; Benn’s father had been both. Rejected nonetheless by his fellow ...”

“... In his memoirs Roy Jenkins describes John Kennedy as the best President of the USA in the past four decades. It is a curious, not to say unfashionable verdict. The demolishers of the Kennedy legend have been carrying all before them in the past few years. So battered is the Kennedy reputation that it is almost time for a new school of revisionist historians to rehabilitate the myth of Camelot on the Potomac ...”

“... of the Press’ and the self-interrogating sections from Ukulele Music warn the reviewer of Peter Reading that he risks becoming entangled in his subject like a gladiator in a net. Even his editors at Secker (not to mention the printer) must feel unnerved – which is excellent. This is poetry at its most unpredictable: we wouldn’t be surprised to ...”

“... his speeches. ‘Lazy? Lazy?’ Bevan responded to a sneer about the laziness of his colleague Roy Jenkins: ‘How can a boy from Abersychan who acquired an accent like that be lazy?’ From Princess Margaret comes a comment on the moribundity of the London Season: ‘Every tart in London can get in.’ Kynaston appreciates the respect for working-class values ...”

“... By the summer of 1958, he had dropped out of school, teamed up with a local guitarist named Johnny Jenkins, and joined a group called Pat T. Cake and His Mighty Panthers. Soul music was coming into its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding ...”

“... In the first two decades after the war, the cream of the Oxford PPE School (Wilson, Healey, Jenkins, Crossman, Crosland etc) tended to gravitate to the Labour benches, lending the Party an intellectual authority which was crucial to its appeal beyond the traditional working class. Whether or not such men were any good in government, they had the ...”

“... that the Government is about to make the same mistake the fourth time running,’ writes Roy Jenkins in his foreword to the book. ‘It is quite extraordinary that a nation should be so incapable of learning.’ His tone of exasperation is understandable. The Ridley Affair shows what we are up against: not least those unflattering aspects of our national ...”

“... Paisley – who helped maintain the minority Labour government in power was fair game. Thanks to Peter Wright’s revelations we are more or less familiar with what went on in this period, though it is important to say that Wallace was the first to make public admission of these campaigns, well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward ...”

“... everything. Wyatt’s cash-register mind was always busy. ‘You’re a bore about money,’ Roy Jenkins told him. The reason is not hard to find. His pleasure at the social splash made by Petronella – ‘more adult than ever, amusing and pretty’ – is immediately calibrated: she seemed ‘immensely rich with no one knowing it was a total outlay of ...”

“... an observation made at an Alliance strategy meeting in 1985 – was well expressed by Roy Jenkins, who said that with the British electoral system a hung Parliament might be a statistical outcome, but that it could not be a political objective. The second was that the strategy immediately invited the question: ‘With whom would the Alliance ...”

“... votes being cast for Margaret Thatcher but might, even now, lead to their being switched to Roy Jenkins instead of Tony Benn. It is true that the record of an internal debate among the committed is not to be read as a prospectus for potential converts. But the cries of disappointment and betrayal, the denunciations of the media, Harold Wilson and the ...”

“... probably applies in every area, not just this one. The few exceptions – Edward Heath or Roy Jenkins – tend to be dismissed as enthusiasts, always a term of abuse in English life. If Thomas is right, the intensive ‘re-education’ that Whitehall prescribed in 1960 did not even take place in its own house. I am rather less worried about the lack of ...”

“... rather than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from their time together at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle and now himself Hon. Mr Justice Potts of the Queen’s Bench ...”