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“... Thompson, it was ‘a group of fat, rich nations feeding each other goodies’. Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Tony Benn led a powerful Labour campaign against the Common Market, in itself a pejorative term on the left. But Roy Jenkins and others on Labour’s centre-right emphasised reconciliation with former enemies, highlighting in particular the ...”

“... A Savage Dream I had a savage dream of destinations: A ten-foot fence, barbed, and on the wire Bones and the rags of prisoners. I had This dream, and woke in the cool English air. For My Father I learn the dead wear shoes. Their beards cast a last shadow. Kissing your face, I’m troubled by the roughness As when you came to tuck me up, Brushed my cheek with yours And tip-toed out ...”

“... come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he really means is ‘the major ...”

“... Pandy, on the Welsh side of the Welsh border, became a political activist at 14, in 1935, when Michael Foot, just down from Oxford, was his local Labour candidate – though the young Williams privately thought Foot too Oxford Union for Pandy village hall. In 1939 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, an informal ...”

“... and says, ‘Are you here?’ ... Yes, I am in one of his cloudy white leather armchairs, with one foot not too disrespectfully on the table, reading Horvâth’s Godless Youth. Without another word, he goes out again, baffling and incommunicable, the invisible man, dampening any speculation. Open House Rawlplugs and polyfilla ... the cheerful, tamping thump ...”

“... five thousand years make the room too hot. How snugly the meadow pipit fits the merlin’s foot. The Wren I am writing too much about Carrigskeewaun, I think, until you two come along, my grandsons, And we generalise at once about cows and sheep. A day here represents a lifetime, bird’s-foot trefoil Among wild ...”

“... a momentary juxtaposition that gathered dust, languishing like umbrella ribs in an elephant’s foot, in saecula saeculorum. As it grew dark, he drew the curtains, so as not to be seen, or not to show how much he couldn’t see. There was a drawn atmosphere as in Buñuel or La Grande Bouffe, like being locked up overnight in an impoverished modern art ...”

“... With no more murmurs in the Liberal ranks In Labour’s there is total consternation. If Michael Foot tore out his hair in hanks He could not look more prone to perturbation. The right wing loudly calls the left wing cranks And no one stays calm in the altercation Except for Tony Benn, who sucks contentedly On his prop pipe and stares ahead ...”

“... into it Trevor from downstairs, security guard at HMV and abject night-time guitarist, tapping his foot into a pile of blankets, black-and-blue notes whimpering through the floor ... My fingers whiten as they bunch themselves to grip my father’s pen. Silver and surgically thin, taken in error, its ink is thicker than ...”

“... including Colwyn Williamson, who had been lecturing in philosophy in Swansea since 1967, and Michael Cohen, a former Tory voter described by Sir Michael Davies as a ‘careful and reasonable sort of person’. In early 1990, all four lecturers, Hunt, Maclean, Williamson and Cohen, formally complained to the Academic ...”

“... of Allied troops to be flung ashore in France to establish a Second Front. In this respect Michael Foot was more gung-ho than Churchill, who feared a massacre on the beaches. One quality that did distinguish Churchill from many other figures in British public life was a brooding consciousness of the war as another stage in the descent of the 20th ...”

“... Tory Party between ‘stricken patricians and over-confident arrivistes’. But then he turns to Michael Foot and – too furious to be consistent – denies him any protection from this ‘tool-of-social-forces’ approach. Instead, Foot gets both barrels fired straight at his moral sensorium, and the shotgun thrown ...”

“... time, her linenEyeballs returning their gaze, her handBy her side as though to welcome them,Her foot poking out of the bandagesAs though to follow them to the exitAnd accompany the rest of their lives.FlycatcherA flycatcher crashed against the window.Amelia cradled the corpse in her handsAnd tried to breathe life into breast-speckles,Imagining a mossy ...”

“... a seat on Lambeth Council. I had worked for two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States ...”

“... their predecessors’ policies and preparations for the next election, were well described in Michael Stewart’s The Jekyll and Hyde Years. It is striking how often fugitive wets address their criticisms of Thatcherite economic policies to the prospect of Conservative defeat in the next election, rather than to the damage they are causing to the country ...”