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“... possibly even the end of a nation.’ But what era feels more remote today than that of Wilson and Heath, the great modernisers for whom modernity failed to arrive? In spirit at least, Churchill has outlived them, taking his place again in British politics as one of the household gods of Mrs Thatcher. Once more his legend influences the future. There is more ...”

“... Eric Laithwaite, whose promising trials of magnetic levitation were shortsightedly thwarted by the Heath government’s withdrawal of funding. Maglev might have become a commercial reality had Laithwaite, like so many of his contemporaries, migrated to the United States and, like Hyperloop, had a test track in Nevada rather than in the Ouse Washes alongside ...”

“... list if you had known what to look for, just as you would have spotted his counterpart in MI5, Sir John Lewis Jones, in the honours list immediately prior to that). What, then, is the point of the fantastic governmental mumbo-jumbo with which the British ‘Secret Service’ surrounds itself? Although it is a rather youthful bureaucratic invention, only about ...”

“... me today? A book of virtually nine hundred pages on F.E. Smith, first Earl of Birkenhead, by John Campbell, has appeared on my desk this morning. John Campbell has written first-rate biographies. I even have a vague recollection that F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was once a figure of some political importance, probably ...”

“... gentlemen, I think we all fought a good fight …’ Trog (Wally Fawkes) was compounded by Edward Heath, who described a party political broadcast located in Macmillan’s country house, where the government’s record is assessed by its top men: And Harold said: ‘Well now, Rab, I think we’ve done very well, don’t you?’ And Rab said: ‘Oh yes, I ...”

“... John Stuart Mill labelled the Conservatives ‘the stupid party’. They have certainly been stupid since 1997, and one wonders if their stupidity will persist. But a related and more interesting question is: ‘Are the Conservatives any longer a serious party?’ A serious party can be one of two things. It can, like the Greens, be concerned with only one issue or one group of issues ...”

“... that the Labour leadership wishes to attend: on the contrary – as Mrs Thatcher did with the Heath government – they seem either to pretend that the Wilson and Callaghan governments did not exist or that they were mistakes for which the Party must endlessly atone. This received view need not go uncontested. In the first place, we have had 12 years of ...”

“... wishing-well in Holland Park for the price of a packet of ten cigarettes, and cruised Hampstead Heath in the early hours for anonymous sex without bothering to mention that he had crabs, who stole fivers from the handbags of his few remaining friends and reckoned they deserved it: did he no longer have a life? That might be one way to understand it. But ...”

“... who is a working peer. The only leading official to whom the Prime Minister talks regularly is John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, who shares something of his political approach and whom he usually sees discreetly, rather than for talks heralded by the TUC. Union leaders have had, perforce, to get used to a vastly diminished status – though none of ...”

“... too ‘hard to tell’. The centrepiece of the novel, extending to 150 pages, rewrites Lear on the heath. On a manic high, half-dressed, with carpet slippers on his feet, Fenchurch takes a bus from Ardsley via Linfield to his native Onasett, where the pit used to be. He has his sketching tablet in hand. In his head he hears the panting of the winding gear, the ...”

“... Kinnock distinguished himself with a rousing speech against joining on the sole ground that Heath was in favour. After a few early contributions, he largely ignored the House of Commons (his lack of experience there is only now a handicap): instead he concentrated on building a reputation in the party in the country, speaking in practically every ...”

“... because of his opposition to the despatch of the Falklands task force. Much of the anger in John Silkin’s posthumously published book is directed against Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Labour’s internal wars of the late Seventies are refought here, culminating in the 1981 election for the Party’s deputy leadership, in which Silkin stood as standard-bearer ...”

“... moment as this one.* It is equally scrupulous though perhaps less arduously discursive. Jeffrey Heath’s collection, animated throughout by his reverence for Forster, is not easy to read. The contents are miscellaneous in character, but readers of Forster are used to that. There has been a conscientious attempt to give the contents a helpful structure, but ...”

“... confused policy on the former Yugoslavia and its pseudo-populist sneering about ‘abroad’ (take John Major’s especially silly remark that he would not choose to spend a weekend in any of the countries he has visited over the past few years – even though he spends summer holidays in Portugal). An additional element of seediness came with the revelations ...”

“... than a gentleman (one of his favourite distinctions), a competent professional of modern spirit. John Kennedy was already dead, but the New Frontier spirit seemed to be alive in the Britain of 1964, and Harold Wilson to exemplify it. We believed him, or some of us did, when he said that he would get Britain going again, bring in new people, harness new ...”