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“... On the contrary, many of them saw the party of Wilson and Callaghan, and even the party of Michael Foot, as (in the old Trotskyist phrase) ‘Labour lieutenants of the capitalist class’. Those members of the staff who did not share this view were castigated as traitors to the cause, and two or three of us were called to account at a staff ...”

“... Englander’ in Taylor coming out, a superannuated cast of mind he shares with his close friend Michael Foot. It is English history that one writes, the Scots, Irish and Welsh constituting ‘the lesser breeds [who] were allowed in when they made a difference in English affairs, as they often did.’ It is also a lingering sense that Britain is still a ...”

“... social democratic solution, tried by George Brown and Harold Wilson in the Sixties and by Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan in the Seventies, is the ‘social contract’ – a private deal between the Government and the unions, by which the unions trade wage restraint in return for extensions of their organisational power. As the last Government ...”

“... political and practical proposition. Sir Denis finds it impossible to believe that Ministers (Michael Foot?) seriously supposed that the unions would be capable of voluntary wage restraint. So he at least was not surprised when this ‘trade-union pay policy’ resulted in 31 per cent wage inflation between July 1974 and July 1975. He concedes that ...”

“... as 1940, when Chamberlain and the arch-appeasers were branded ‘the guilty men’ by a young Michael Foot and two other socialist polemicists. They overstated what was an arguable case, that the executors of appeasement’s closing phase had been arrogant, ignorant and insensitive; which naturally bred a counter-argument to the effect that they had ...”

“... the comment of an unidentified left-wing Labour MP, a year after the Party had instead chosen Michael Foot as its leader in November 1980. The Parliamentary Party, in its last chance to determine the leadership before constitutional reform overtook it, had given Foot 139 votes to Healey’s 129. There are many ways ...”

“... with Tom Driberg, the well-known Communist who later became Chairman of the Labour Party and, on Michael Foot’s special plea, a Labour peer. Driberg, an active undergraduate Communist at Oxford, was closely associated in politics with A.J.P. Taylor, who himself travelled in Russia in the 1920s, where he met the Bolshevik leader Kirov. During the ...”

“... from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a ...”

“... feeling, they wept. Then, last night, the final twist occurred. The tribe fell upon her assailant, Michael Heseltine, and slew him, too.’ But the mere exclusion of Heseltine from the leadership seemed insufficient atonement for the unnatural enormity of matricide. Within the Tory tribe there was to be no healing, no reconciliation, no closure. This was a ...”

“... a moccasin with a gaping sole, shabby with use. A certain Unknown Being puts you on his left foot and shuffles across the floor. But for the most part the writing is unpleasantly barrel-chested. The poems lose by having valorous lines promoted to choruses: ‘Man lives by sky alone’ is repeated five times in ‘Chagall’s Cornflowers’, the fifth ...”

“... the Labour Party would do better in the next election under Neil Kinnock than it did in 1983 under Michael Foot: but a small percentage increase in its vote, and even thirty or forty more seats, would not take Labour back to the level even of its 1979 defeat. It would only be a temporary remission in its terminal decline. The publication a year ago of How ...”

“... optimism -‘cheerfulness in the bunker’ – before polling day in the 1874 General Election. ‘Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign’ is a cheeky aside, given that Jenkins evidently expects his readers to remember who was in which bunker at the relevant moment. There is more to Gladstone, however, than politics. His restless ...”

“... of nous. The top gun-boat exponent of the lot, A prancing lion where once crouched a mouse, Is Michael Foot, who now speaks for the nation In this alleged Hour of Humiliation. Lord Carrington presents the dazed PM With his own head upon a point of honour. The nitwit Nott stays at his post pro tem Though in the long term he must be a goner. Poor ...”

“... coalitions known as the Conservative Party (under Margaret Thatcher) and the Labour Party (under Michael Foot) became fixated with ideological purity. Nor was there any electorally credible alternative, with the first past the post system thwarting the aspirations of the Liberal-SDP Alliance. Already, ideological purists of various stripes have ...”

“... Jeremy Corbyn, however maladroit and out of step with the party’s rebranding since the era of Michael Foot, is the darling of the growing Labour membership, and that his performance in the general election of 2017 vastly exceeded the party’s expectations. For all that the Labour Party has tried to exploit Remainer discontent with the May ...”