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“... would never be enough. Once tempted, politicians would be unable to keep their hands off what Roy Jenkins called ‘a more powerful weapon against progressive legislation than anything we have known in this country since the curbing of the absolute powers of the House of Lords’. But it turned out that one referendum was exactly enough and the people’s ...”

“... First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to 1914. The contrast is not so much between an era of greatness and ...”

“... however improbably, in winning the trust of left-wing politicians. Who exploits who? When it’s David Lloyd George, he exploits them. But when it’s Harold Wilson?2 December 1997. Unable to attend Peter Hennessy’s public lecture on Blair’s version of prime-ministerial government, but he sends a copy. It confirms the impression that collective cabinet ...”

“... the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’ This is a pretty cruel thing ...”

“... lists were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ...”

“... Ltd by Blair & Co. Nor did I expect to be reproved, however gently, for indiscretion by Simon Jenkins on the op-ed page of the Times – as if I hadn’t cleared what I proposed to print with anyone quoted directly who might have suffered in consequence, or would have dreamed of disclosing to LRB readers without Simon’s express permission what he had ...”

“... intergovernmental co-operation à l’anglaise in favour of the ‘Community method’, and Roy Jenkins to relaunch the concept of monetary union during his first year as President of the Commission. With all its faults, the EEC is still the best available prototype of the sort of transnational power-sharing to which his analysis points. The strength and ...”

“... which willy-nilly drove this forward, in the long run did the party more harm than good. David Cameron is almost certainly aware of this but clearly isn’t sure what he can do about it. Once again, the problem is likely to be solved – to the extent that it can be – by accumulating error on the government’s part. The Tories just have to make ...”

“... Nicholas Deakin in Colour and Citizenship as ‘the liberal hour’. The then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, accepted the demand made by the Board, but, very reasonably, requested evidence that discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or national or ethnic origin was prevalent in the areas of employment, housing or the provision of public ...”

“... more time to accumulate form. The three men whom he followed – Kenneth Clarke, Kenneth Baker and David Waddington – together occupied the post for just a few months more than he has already served. Baker’s brief romp managed to produce two absurdities, the first comic in the form of the Dangerous Dogs Act, the second tragic, in the form of his refusal to ...”

“... important speeches and fight important fights. She found that role exhausting as well as exciting. David Owen contends and Williams concedes that she let her new party down and damaged her own career by not fighting Warrington – which Roy Jenkins narrowly lost and Williams could certainly have won – in a by-election in ...”

“... voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a thousand pages. A great virtue of John Keegan’s is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually and ...”

“... even if (as I suggested a few weeks ago) there was not then the degree of national consensus which David Marquand, in The Unprincipled Society, would have us believe, there was at any rate full employment, or as near to it as a liberal-democratic capitalist society is ever going to get. But just as, in the Thirties, the failure of the previous Labour ...”

“... is a dance to the music of lost time, only more of a quickstep than the stately measure Nicholas Jenkins imagines for Poussin’s Seasons. The music goes round and round, like the wheel, and what Powell suggests, in this light, oblique novel, is not that the dancers are all gone under the hill or show up in strange configurations, but that the dance releases ...”