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“... reasons, any subsequent attempt to rival Churchill might seem doomed (though that didn’t stop Harold Macmillan from publishing his own six volumes, more conspicuous today on the shelves of second-hand bookshops than in the hands of a new generation of readers). It’s a rule of thumb in reading – or weighing – politicians’ memoirs to infer some ...”

“... that they systematically plotted against at least two of Eden’s successors: Edward Heath and Harold Wilson. According to the evidence of three people who worked in or close to Intelligence in the mid-Seventies – Peter Wright, Cathy Massiter and Colin Wallace – a substantial section of MI5 was working almost full time to disorientate the ...”

“... author: the real people he describes may seem too predictable for credibility. For instance, Mary Wilson is welcoming guests at 10 Downing Street and immediately begins talking about the difficulty of getting poetry published. Well, she would, wouldn’t she? No, actually. An anecdote may help me here. When I was preparing in 1982 to review Simon Raven’s ...”

“... will then claim the right to a dissolution and a fresh election as soon as it suits them, as Mr Wilson did in October 1974. The calculation, especially for a minority Conservative administration, will be that repeated elections will exhaust the resources of their rivals and perhaps burst the bubble of Alliance support. But surely, the question asks ...”

“... In the first weeks of the new Labour Administration in 1964 there was a bitter wrangle between Harold Wilson and the Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Cromer. Cromer demanded an immediate rise in interest rates. Wilson replied that he had fought an election on economic expansion and low interest rates, and was ...”

“... by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime minister wasn’t inclined to believe the accusations. It turned out that Frolik had never actually met Stonehouse, and there was no evidence that Stonehouse was homosexual. In his ...”

“... from this consensus, and, above all, by the failure of the new British Labour Government, under Harold Wilson in May 1974, to face what in its early stages was a very shaky Workers’ Strike against the new Executive. The consequent collapse of the Executive, as its Unionist members became aware of Britain’s failure to suppress the rebellion – for ...”

“... also the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone through the motions of a renegotiation of Britain’s place in the European Economic Community and, with that token effort behind him, shepherded the forces of pragmatism to a resounding victory for remaining in the Common Market. The ...”

“... an Ulster Unionist MP are too lightly passed over, especially in view of his role in keeping the Wilson-Callaghan Government afloat when it lost its majority, and Shepherd is perhaps too much of a pro-European himself to give Powell his full prophetic credit. Over and over again in the early Seventies Powell argued that the ‘full-hearted consent’ of the ...”

“... plentiful diaristic accounts of the 1964-70 Labour Government. (Benn reveals, incidentally, that Harold Wilson promised that he would publish posthumously the real inside story of his government.) Many of the incidents and personalities that Benn describes are now of historical interest only, as indeed is the great battle he fought for the right to ...”

“... state for Scotland between 1964 and 1970, and again from 1974 until the retirement of his patron, Harold Wilson, in the spring of 1976. Ross came from Ayr in the Lowlands and had been a schoolteacher before rising to the rank of major in the Highland Light Infantry during the Second World War. He was also a pillar of the Kirk. A glowering – and ...”

“... conflict came during the ceasefire called by the IRA in February 1975. The British prime minister, Harold Wilson, was directly involved in contacts with the IRA, sometimes bypassing not only his cabinet but also Merlyn Rees, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland. The successful loyalist strike of the previous year, which had brought down the ...”

“... been possible over the imposition of a mere £23m of charges on dentures and glasses. Indeed, when Harold Wilson and John Freeman met with Bevan to discuss their collective resignation from the cabinet, Wilson kept saying: ‘It’s not enough, Nye. We have to broaden the issue. We can’t just resign over specs and ...”

“... Scott was in touch, however innocently, with people with South African associations. In fact, Harold Wilson, like Lloyd George, has been caught out telling the truth, even if the truth was rather irrelevant. The final pages give a version of what the jury thought, said and voted. The authors know next to nothing of Newton, the man who did the ...”

“... governments are inadequately detailed. Major blunders, such as the handling of the UWC strike by Harold Wilson and Merlyn Rees, are skated over. It is quite clear from Rees’s memoirs that the British Government had no intention of facing up to the Loyalists. All the same, the authors have come up with some extremely interesting titbits. For ...”