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“... it often seems a lifetime, so crowded has his premiership been with crises of one sort or another. Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon not unreasonably, therefore, think this the moment to assess his prime ministerial career; the result is The Major Effect, a collection of 26 essays by a distinguished group of commentators – including the editors. Five ...”

“... we come to Mrs Thatcher, a central figure in the three other books under review, particularly in Dennis Kavanagh’s careful and well-researched study of the causes and consequences of the breakdown of the post-war political consensus. Mrs Thatcher took office as a ‘political mobiliser’, not a ‘political conciliator’; a warrior, not a healer. To ...”

“... on the barricades (that production to open in London next spring) is very doubtful. The Butler and Kavanagh book has no cheerier message for the Labour Party. It traces how opinion in the British electorate – in particular on nationalisation and the trade unions – has been shifting over a number of decades, and it is these longer-term movements in public ...”

“... answer, we now have the Nuffield volume on last year’s election.† in which David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh recount the ebb and flow of battle in that relentlessly detailed and studiously prosaic style which has characterised the Nuffield studies from the beginning; and there is precious little comfort in it for Neil Kinnock, even without the ...”

“... academic study of a French election. It is now evident that Butler’s (and, since 1974, Dennis Kavanagh’s) work is irreplaceable: each volume includes things a political historian needs to know and can find nowhere else. The lack of a stronger sociological and analytic perspective remains a vexation – the French are undoubtedly better at ...”

“... and Thatcher have less to go on, and are more vulnerable to the prejudices of their readers. Dennis Kavanagh is nicer about the Heath Government than I find plausible; the Seventies syndrome of absurdly over-optimistic promises followed by continuous industrial strife was started by Heath’s famous promise to reduce prices at a stroke; and the ...”

“... displace – a future biography without taking years to concentrate on a memoir? Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll have found a good way. Stepping Stones is not quite Heaney’s autobiography: it is, instead, a long collection of interviews, revised collaboratively, in which Heaney describes each phase of his life. Only a poet of Heaney’s repute could ...”

“... that is separate and a little sorrowing’, as Heaney put it once, a line quoted back at him by Dennis O’Driscoll in the epic 2008 book of interviews called Stepping Stones that will stand as a partial monument to both men. If Heaney – who, it turns out, fished only about a dozen times in his life – ever did any ‘Casting and Gathering’, it ...”

“... called an ‘Irish bull’. Heaney bought Glob’s book the year it appeared: opening it, he told Dennis O’Driscoll, the most assiduous of his very many interviewers, was ‘like opening a gate … the minute I opened it and saw the photographs, and read the text, I knew there was going to be yield from it.’Heaney had already been drawn to write boggy ...”