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“... was dead, and the revisionists needed a champion. George Brown was too unreliable, and Roy Jenkins too remote. Crosland seemed to be the man. After all, he was the high priest of revisionism. He had charted its course in happier days. Who better to lead it through the storms that followed Gaitskell’s death? For most of my Parliament – the ...”

“... by the miners’ strike. In the February election the voters returned an uncertain decision: Harold Wilson’s Labour Party took 301 seats on 11.7 million votes, Heath’s Tories got 297 seats on 11.9 million votes, and the Liberals led by Jeremy Thorpe found that their six million votes translated into 14 seats. The Liberals’ mini-revival suggested a ...”

“... word ‘problem’. Perhaps the best single introduction to Hamlet is the long essay that prefaces Harold Jenkins’s Arden edition. Jenkins opens his critical discussion with a sub-section entitled ‘Problems’, which begins: ‘Few, I imagine, would challenge the assertion that’ – here he quotes from Harry Levin ...”

“... feel you speak for them, and feel honoured to leave their fate in your hands. Marcia Falkender, Harold Wilson’s much feared secretary, believed that Williams had a gift that ‘few male and even female politicians possess’: ‘an ability to project an idealised version of herself, a myth in which all those around her believe gladly and ...”

“... Common Market? The campaign was launched in April 1975 at a press conference chaired by Roy Jenkins (then Labour), sitting on a platform together with Cledwyn Hughes (Labour), Jo Grimond (Liberal), Willie Whitelaw and Reginald Maudling (both Conservatives) and the diplomat Con O’Neill. Harold Wilson supported ...”

“... election to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee – the first non-MP to do so since Harold Laski – and carved out a space for himself there, allied with but not wholly subsumed by the Bennites. When Neil Kinnock took on Militant, Blunkett dragged his feet, publicly offered Derek Hatton an olive branch, and was considered ‘fundamentally ...”

“... Heath. It was also something of a shock to hear that she had toyed with the idea of inviting Roy Jenkins back from Europe to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1979. Otherwise it is pretty much the story as we know it: one can, reading Young, get the feeling that one is reading ten years of the Guardian again. It is very much a political correspondent’s ...”

“... survived Eisenhower’s explicit rejection of a ‘special’ relationship, was understandable. Harold Macmillan had no such excuse. Dismayed by Churchill’s change of front on Europe when he became prime minister, Macmillan had almost resigned from the Cabinet in 1952. Yet although, after the Suez débâcle, Eisenhower, Dulles and Adenauer had all thought ...”

“... a good time – and good times are what she chiefly writes about. After a supper at Petworth where Harold Macmillan had been present, she told Waugh that ‘except for a weakness for anecdotes about the peerage, everything he said was interesting,’ but added: ‘I doubt if he would enjoy a jolly jokes evening.’ That, to the extent that it’s fair to judge ...”

“... Desdemona was suspected of carrying on with another fellow. Again, it is a happy discovery that Harold Wilson should affirm ‘the need to revise some kind of puritanism in the Party’ – a kind of revisionism in fact deplored by Wilson who, Crossman went on to note, ‘was careful to remind me twice that he couldn’t tell the difference between hock and ...”

“... nothing else and now they had some new, very serious acrylic greens: permanent green, earth green, Jenkins green, titanium green, Prussian green, a phthalo green so fucking intense that just a teardrop of this stuff could colonise a blob of white. Michael Boone’s father was a butcher in the small town of Bacchus Marsh near Melbourne – hence his son’s ...”

“... Hackney aliens. A tasty ruck in Ridley Road market. The kind of affair witnessed by the youthful Harold Pinter. The chapel was a popular source of neighbourhood charity, handing out free shirts (black only), sturdy boots, to anyone who would join the movement. Now ownership rights are a dubious privilege. A group of Sikh developers are finding their ...”

“... of revival originated in the late Fifties, peaked in 1962 with Orpington, and petered out after Harold Wilson’s narrow victory in 1964. The second erupted in the early 1970s and reached a climax in 1974: if Grimond had remained Leader until this point, 1974 might well have been the year in which the mould of British politics was broken. The third phase ...”

“... word being closely attended to, even feared, by ministers and by the public. And it was feared. Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 and 1974-76 Governments and James Callaghan’s 1976-79 Administration spent more time cajoling, ‘standing up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of ...”

“... but neglected figures. How right he is, for example, to see the career of the political scientist Harold Laski as one of ‘intense and enduring human interest as a tale of a man of transcendent intellectual integrity who strove to reconcile socialist planning with a liberal and pluralist view of democracy’. Still more interesting is Morgan’s chapter on ...”