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“... the Trots; political networking; president of the National Union of Students; political adviser to Barbara Castle and then Peter Shore (there are shrewd portraits of both); local government (he was elected to the old Inner London Education Authority and became its deputy leader); Labour candidate, first in a hopeless seat, then the safe Labour seat of ...”

“... classless style. But she does not have that extra dimension, obvious for example in people like Barbara Castle or Shirley Williams as ministers, of being a warm personality in an essentially male environment.’ Certainly a personality does come across in these pages. Our PM clearly has both mental and physical courage (witness her visit to Armagh) and ...”

“... the late Eighties who do not fill the odd moment between division bells or Cabinets (if not, like Barbara Castle, actually at them) writing up a currilous version of events in order to give themselves financial or other forms of pleasure in their old age. Not only is there a good market for diaries among the book-buying and Sunday-newspaper-reading ...”

“... voting on the same side as the Italian Communists. And Labour Members of the Parliament like Mrs Barbara Castle, pledged to oppose any extension of its power, have found themselves extending its influence. Europe’s constitutional battles can make nonsense of national party lines. So it’s an engrossing story, with possible portents for Europe’s ...”

“... with Nye and in Foot’s life of Bevan. This sort of statesman needs and appreciates philosophers. Barbara Castle, gleefully broadcasting about Foot’s recent assumption of Labour Party leadership, announced: ‘Michael will be setting his decisions within a philosophic context – which appeals to the soul of the Labour Party.’ It was almost the same ...”

“... to a very senior position in the Department of Health and Social Security. Marcia greatly admires Barbara Castle, perhaps at one time Labour’s answer to Mrs Thatcher, although her quarrels with Jim Callaghan led to his sacking her from the Cabinet when he took over the reins. As Harold often joked, women seldom make it to the top jobs. The Home Office ...”

“... recognisable as an amalgam of the passing generation of Labour heavyweights, from Benn himself to Barbara Castle and bruisers like Denis Healey and Eric Heffer. Its atmosphere derived from the lurid tales of spookery and skulduggery that emerged in the dying days of Harold Wilson’s premiership, when the longstanding suspicion that Wilson was a KGB ...”

“... is not hard to guess what this hard-boiled gathering – Bob Mellish, Denis Healey, Tony Crosland, Barbara Castle, Roy Jenkins, Jim Callaghan among them – made of that. Fifteen years later, Benn showed me his father’s election handbill and made the same point – one he must have made to hundreds of others. Where Thatcher rose up the English class ...”

“... be used in evidence against them by no fewer than three intending diarists. There they sat, Dick, Barbara and Tony, scribbling away while the nation’s fate was being decided. No wonder there was resentment among the less literary members of the Cabinet. They didn’t think it was fair. It is also a misfortune that all three of those diarists were broadly ...”

“... left adds enormously to the value of Tony Benn’s Diaries. His contemporaries Dick Grossman and Barbara Castle have also published diaries. Others have written autobiographies. All are full of evidence of the impotence of office. Even Denis Healey in his recent popular autobiography admits that the notorious ‘IMF cuts’ in 1976 were probably based ...”

“... Foot’s marriage to Jill Craigie. Although Craigie wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea – not Barbara Castle’s, for a start – she was clearly a wonderful partner for Foot, but Morgan can’t stop there: ‘The Labour Party cherishes its great partnerships – Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Douglas and Margaret Cole, the Callaghans, the Kinnocks, the ...”

“... Yet she was a far greater figure than Ellen Wilkinson, Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield or Barbara Castle. Her neglect shows how important it is to have members of your party or faction evoking your name as part of their tradition. Perhaps the greatest recent example of what this can do for popular memory is Aneurin Bevan, whose myth reflected ...”

“... the first ballot, Morrison trailing dismally in third place. Bevanites like Wilson, Crossman and Barbara Castle were livid, for there could be little pretence but that power-mongering was at the root of Bevan’s politics. Although he made his peace with Gaitskell, a sort of Bevanism lived on in the Victory for Socialism and Tribune groups and in a ...”

“... club. For E.P. 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 ...”

“... was frustrated by her tendency to get mired in detail. Contrast this with the record of Barbara Castle, Labour’s top woman at a string of second-rank ministries a few years earlier. Like Williams, Castle never held the great offices of state, but she wrung headlines and achievements from the most thankless ...”