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“... one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what happened when James ...”

“... Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have had no better champion since John Wayne. The nation’s youth have another icon on which to click. What makes his resuscitation the more beguiling is that New Labour’s project has been built on an emphatic rejection of Bennism. In 1981, backed by the hard Left in the unions and the ...”

“... the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’ Motion by John Dunning, passed by the House of Commons, 6 April 1780. A constitution is a device for limiting the power of the executive. That ought to answer the question whether Britain needs one. For most of the 20th century, indeed ever since the Parliament Act of 1911 ...”

“... leaders were being hounded for instant comment. Crucially, Labour’s Defence Spokesman, John Silkin, went onto the important World at One radio programme, and seemed to commit the Opposition to a belligerent reaction. Uncharacteristically, I leapt to my telephone to ask what was going on, and was calmed down by Anne Carleton, his long-term personal ...”

“... the same treatment. But that is surely not so. It wouldn’t, for example, have happened to either Callaghan or Healey. Some have suggested that it was because he was Welsh: the English have an ineradicable stereotype of the garrulous Taffy and Kinnock was made to fit it. Yet this, again, is hardly true. Some English, for instance, might have feared Lloyd ...”

“... to take his challenge seriously. Wilson’s tactic was to ignore him, treat him as a bore. Callaghan regarded him as a Sixties figure who, he hoped, would be passed over by the Eighties. Yet all through the Seventies – we can now see, looking back – while Benn was making headlines, his cause was making solid organisational headway. The ingredients ...”

“... success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison ...”

“... addressing himself to Irish history and contemporary politics ought always to bear in mind John Stuart Mill’s provocative remark, that it was not Ireland but England that was the exception: ‘Ireland is in the mainstream of human existence and human feeling and experience; it is England that is one of the lateral channels.’ Of the authors under ...”

“... of his great friend, Bevan, quotes this passage from an obituary of Gaitskell, written in 1963 by John Strachey, who had strong relations with both men and who attended, as they did, the weekly dinner given for a small group of ministers by Stafford Cripps. Bevan, writes Foot, ‘would give Gaitskell a verbal lashing, and Gaitskell would reply with cold ...”

“... dates from long before the boy from the Rhondda made it to the Speaker’s chair, and shows Jim Callaghan dropping on his knees to pray with Thomas and then, having softened him up, requesting his support for the party leadership. True or false – and who cares? – this is just old-fashioned Parliamentary back-stabbing, and Viscount Tonypandy, with his ...”

“... battles which made the break inevitable. He shows that Evan Luard’s Socialism Without the State, John Horam’s calls for ‘market socialism’ and David Owen’s evocation of the co-operative, decentralist element in the British socialist tradition exemplified a widespread mood, with which the old Right of the Labour Party had no more in common than had ...”

“... taller buildings, hotels of magnificence, a convention centre. In Watsonville the City Manager, John Radin, toured the streets, civil engineer in tow. Radin dreams of a Watsonville renewed in the image of Santa Rosa, a metastasising node on the lymph glands running north from San Francisco. To observant citizens there seemed to be a politically coherent ...”

“... Party, was one variety, and it differed from Tony Benn’s variety as it did from the Wilson-Callaghan variety. That Party in turn differed significantly from Attlee’s, which differed even more from Ramsay MacDonald’s. And so on. We could argue, indeed, that Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism presented as much of a challenge to the ideological ...”

“... There are less unexpected points in the other essays and it is a pity that one of them claims John Knox as the father of Scottish Presbyterianism, and another contrasts ‘history’ with ‘herstory’. Points can be made without insulting the English language. From Glasgow Presbytery in 1960 comes a remark on women’s ordination: ‘every religion ...”

“... poetry; had been anointed as the diabolic successor to Aleister Crowley; had nearly interested John Betjeman in socialism and A.J.P. Taylor in incense. But he was one of those modernists who could only have been formed by an observance of tradition: he needed an anchor as much as he wanted a sailor. I only knew him at the fag-end of his career, when the ...”