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“... would choose to see himself as Macbeth, Dalyell relishes the role of Banquo’s ghost. He pestered Harold Wilson with a troops-out-of-Borneo demand which was ultimately conceded. His concern for the unique ecological system of an Indian Ocean atoll led him to save it from the RAF, hungry for a staging post, thus ensuring that such species as the ...”

“... Times crossword. More recently, Edward Heath never quite overcame his unease with the press, while Harold Wilson could never wholly hide the peculiar fascination which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news ...”

“... at election times. Thus in the 1929 election programme ‘socialism’ was not mentioned. Harold Wilson went even further. In his two broadcasts during the 1966 Election he did not even mention ‘Labour’ though he, had time to mention ‘Britain’ 42 times and ‘government’ 39 times. In other words, Labour leaders over the years ...”

“... who started out as a Cornish scholarship girl and rose to become a senior civil servant under Harold Wilson and Edward Heath and, later, a top executive at breakfast television – has written a memoir of her rise to the top of the British establishment. Sentence by sentence, her story is likeable and impressive but never very exciting to read. Most ...”

“... Miliband wrote in the 1972 edition of Parliamentary Socialism, channelling disillusionment with Harold Wilson, who appeared to have betrayed his left-wing promise. Miliband thought the left within the party would always struggle to influence a moderate leadership; it seemed impossible to him, as it did to everyone until it actually happened, that ...”

“... unsuccessfully to get a leg over’ Margaret Thatcher. He not only recites the well-known story of Harold Macmillan’s cuckolding by Robert Boothby but indulges himself in fascinated gossip about who then got Sara Macmillan (or Boothby) pregnant, driving her to alcoholism and an early death. Junor’s patron, Lord Beaverbrook, receives a full working-over. He ...”

“... Much of the fascination lies in seeing how Benn himself developed from being a left-of-centre Wilson fan (and he was a fan) to having, as he puts it in the foreword to the first volume, a ‘real socialist understanding of the structure of our society’: the diaries are thus those of a ‘socialist in the making’. At another level, they are an account ...”

“... when Rupert Murdoch bought the newspaper. Heren was told that, at 61, he was too old. Under Harold Evans he failed to flourish (‘Evans trashes me, to use the US Army expression, and most of my former colleagues in his book Good Times, Bad Times’), so he took his redundancy money and settled for writing books. His autobiographical Growing up in ...”

“... the wartime coalition and the Attlee Government, lost their places on the National Executive to Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman, the candidates of the Left. Dalton sulked, but Morrison made a shrewd and emollient speech against self-gratifying Conference resolutions which failed to impress working-class voters. Crossman himself was booed for ...”

“... for our general education, followed by chapters on ‘Lloyd George’s maundy money’ and ‘the Wilson years’, and concludes with chapters – to which the whole survey may be said to be steered – on ‘Thatcher’s honoured industrialists’ and ‘Thatcher’s political honours’. It is nonsense to claim, as the publisher does, that Walker has ...”

“... desires and aspirations’ were best represented by ‘dukes, earls and barons’. Later Harold Wilson used exactly the same analogy to Smith. Most Colonial Office personnel seem to have taken Banda’s and Wilson’s side. In March 1965 the British high commissioner in Southern Rhodesia attended some of ...”

“... actually risked his life on behalf of his country (Clem Attlee was another). Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson didn’t. It isn’t quite clear what Owen means to conclude from this peculiar passage. But most intelligent readers would assume that he is saying that we ought to be much more belligerent in our foreign policy because that is the way working ...”

“... record of the inner workings of the Labour Party during the transition from the Attlee era to the Wilson years. The period covered saw the Bevanite revolt in the early 1950s, the subsequent emergence of a revisionist critique of socialism, and the efforts by Hugh Gaitskell to fight and fight again to save the party which many of his political heirs have now ...”

“... him the Scoutmaster General. This was, of course, the golden age of another Congregationalist, Harold Wilson. Though his much misunderstood resignation from the Attlee Government in 1951 had identified him as a Bevanite, Wilson spent most of the following decade trying to build bridges with the Gaitskellite ...”

“... for granted.Taking political liberties himself, Powell chose to betray his own party and plot with Harold Wilson to defeat Edward Heath. I visited Pentonville Prison in December, on a tour to mark the jail’s 175th anniversary. No phones, no laptops – instant isolation and unease. Pentonville was considered a model new prison when it was built in the ...”