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“... Suez, but clearly it would be useful to any biographer to have the full run of Foreign Office and Cabinet papers from 1951 to 1957. There are, however, two other sources which must be of some significance and are evidently not available to the author. One is Eden’s own private papers, notes, correspondence etc (as opposed to purely official files in the ...”

“... which we can well appreciate 35 years later. The new prime minister lived uneasily in the shadow of his illustrious predecessor – whose legs bestrode the ocean and whose reared arm crested the world – and his own honeymoon period of popular affection proved short-lived. Within months of taking over, the knives were out and even the Tory press ...”

“... that one or other of these great investigative newspapers ‘had something’ on a minister or a shadow minister had been well known in the trade during the general election campaign, prompting Tory and Labour spokesmen to issue thinly disguised threats about what might befall any editor who went in for more dirty tricks like the one that had been ...”

“... Corbyn, Michael Meacher, Clare Short, Gavin Strang – have been given only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their own voices by Gordon Brown. No one has been more aware of the collapse of the Bennite agenda than Benn himself. His volume ...”

“... currency. Are dispensations different? As ghosts, can they pass the ports? I thought of a court of shadow ambassadors, with shadow portfolios tucked within their silks. There is a rhythm – and you know this – to which people move in any great public space. There is a certain speed which is no one’s decision, but which ...”

“... so: at the Party Conference of 1981 in Blackpool, Mrs Thatcher ‘passed through the valley of the shadow of doubt’, which is a buy-one-get-one-free approach to metaphor. For those who can bear another revolution, Jenkins proposes a third, to make good the deficiencies and resolve the dialectical antinomies of the first two. At the heart of Jenkins’s ...”

“... new legislation: the point was to make the NHS work properly, which meant endlessly badgering the Cabinet for more money for more hospitals. Bevan could have no complaint about that and Shepherd’s book carries a photograph of the two men at a rugby match together. But Macleod had to give up bridge tournaments for a while after the sight of the Minister of ...”

“... in Amboyna and Uliase, ‘two islands near the equator, where necessarily there is little or no shadow cast at noon, the people make it a rule not to go out of the house at mid-day, because they fancy that by doing so a man may lose the shadow of his soul.’ That at least we might have guessed, and how did the Master ...”

“... us that it is a responsible party led by grave statesmen, it is speaking from within the long shadow of the Seventies. And it seems very likely that during the course of this election the Conservatives will have been insinuating into our consciousness all those now familiar words – ‘chaos’, ‘ungovernable’, ‘inflation’, ‘trade ...”

“... in his senses imagines that the result will make the slightest difference. We have lived in the shadow of two great problems for the last ten years and more. One is unemployment; the other is inflation. To my mind, inflation is the more catastrophic of the two because it saps the very foundations of civilisation. Maybe I think this because I am too old and ...”

“... Thatcherism continues to cast its long shadow over British politics. At the general election Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be moving beyond Thatcherism and William Hague implicitly claimed to be moving back to it. During the campaign it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady ...”

“... have a strong air of contemporary authenticity. The entry for 23 September 2002 dealing with the cabinet meeting held on the eve of the recall of parliament to debate Iraq focuses not on the ‘September dossier’ but on the general balance of discussion within cabinet, and especially on his own contribution as an ...”

“... Western Front. No man alive has lunched more politicians and permanent secretaries or scoured more Cabinet minutes and ministerial diaries than Peter Hennessy. He combines scholarly precision and journalistic inquisitiveness. He also has a kindly nature, which he does not trouble to conceal: ‘I am one of those who has some sympathy with the political and ...”

“... He finds it worthwhile to tell us that Jim Prior told him that one or two other members of the Cabinet had in turn told him that they had ‘tried 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 ...”

“... of the new electorate. His claim to be the interpreter of these voters’ views propelled him into cabinet astonishingly quickly, in 1880, as President of the Board of Trade. He next marketed himself as the best man to communicate with the millions of voters who would be enfranchised in 1885. He threatened to carry all before him, to dictate the future ...”