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“... At an international conference I attended the other day someone spoke of European civilisation as the civilisation of Christendom, the Renaissance and the Welfare State. A somewhat flowery way of putting it, perhaps: but then it can certainly be argued that the Welfare State is the principal flower in the post-war blossoming of Western Europe. Moreover, the speaker presumably intended to place the modern Welfare State among the greatest achievements of European civilisation, an order transcending frontiers ...”

“... professionals – bank managers, for example – hire trade-union mercenaries – Mr Clive Jenkins, for example – in the same way as they hire tax accountants. Trade-unionism is an approved form of behaviour: group venality, providing it is called trade-unionism, is therefore permissible. We do try to draw a line where life and death is involved, but ...”

“... Yalta’ is not a word that often comes to mind. Ask someone on the bus or try it on the children. Yalta? For anyone living in the eastern part of Europe, the meeting of the Big Three at a small resort in the Crimea, in February 1945, is the seminal event of modern times, a calamity almost on a par with the Fall. Not that that part of Europe had lacked calamities, but they had hitherto seemed part of a European experience – the European experience: Yalta has, in effect, resulted in its expulsion from Europe ...”

“... He has come a long way. Born the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, he inevitably became by public-school nickname ‘Wedgie’ and later, by his own socialist deed-poll, plain ‘Tony Benn’. Today he is more often referred to simply as Benn – a hard word spat out like ‘Lenin’. Benn puzzles and alarms people because he is at the same time frightfully English and frighteningly un-English ...”

“... future of the Labour Party as an electoral force. Nevertheless, it is useful to be reminded by Roy Jenkins in the preface to a collection of his essays and speeches that he broke with Labour ‘not because I feared it could not be elected, but because, with its new policies, I did not want it to be elected’. In the 1979 Dimbleby Lecture, here reprinted, he ...”

“... staying in Europe. He has shown great political skill and insight.’ He reports also that Roy Jenkins subsequently conceded, most generously, that he had ‘misunderstood’ Wilson’s handling of the issue. It is true, I now think, that Wilson could not have held the European line, and the Labour Party together, through the years of opposition between ...”

“... The ‘trade-union problem’ has dominated British politics for the last two decades. It has been the downfall of three governments – Wilson’s in 1970, Heath’s in 1974 and Callaghan’s in 1979. During that time, full employment and free collective bargaining became at last incompatible, and the former was in effect abandoned in 1968. As the union problem grew more acute, the relative decline of the British economy accelerated – although which was chiefly responsible for the other is less obvious ...”

“... Snip and you have, for example, the violent spirit of the time: Bath Theatre Royal bar manager Mr Peter Coe is being treated for back injuries after being attacked by two Brownies. The girls, aged about nine, lost their tempers because he had run out of ice cream. They kicked and kneed him and he was hurt when he fell over ... Other members of Mr Coe’s ...”

“... Mrs Thatcher’s two election victories have prompted a debate on the left at the bottom of which lurks the question: is socialism dead? There are several prongs to the case put forward by the ‘new revisionists’ who, in contrast to the Gaitskell-Croslandite revisionists of the past, are not right-wingers seeking to save the Labour Party from socialism but, for the most part, Marxists who have found it necessary to make a fundamental reappraisal of the socialist project ...”

“... Some of his colleagues are already saying it. Looking almost smooth – the Prime Minister, Peter Jenkins reports, has had occasion to tell him to ‘get a haircut’ – Nigel Lawson reassured his audience at the Mansion House in the autumn that revenues were high and the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement could soon be reduced to about a billion ...”

“... revenue, the company was vested in trustees. But the press as a whole had no such luck. As Simon Jenkins has reminded us, the great proprietors bought and sold their newspapers for power, prestige and, they hoped, money. The brothers Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer ...”

“... as the First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to 1914. The contrast is not so much between an era of ...”

“... to London to be done in by city slickers on the Guardian labour desk, where he was indentured to Peter Jenkins: ‘ “He was very nice to work with: extremely conscientious,” recalled Jenkins, who was two years younger than his deputy. “He probably thought I was a bit flash and metropolitan.” ’ One doubts ...”

“... of parents to recoil from those schools in which it will be mandatory. In a recent interview with Peter Jenkins in the Independent, Mrs Thatcher outlined the place and purpose of such a curriculum with her usual candour and with what has been taken to be an even greater commitment than Baker’s to the wholesale dismantling of state education. You are ...”

“... not only on one politician or party, and least of all on the Civil Service and the executive. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian was the first to get it right, when he told a protest rally: ‘This is Parliament’s war!’ The end of the Falklands affair was not difficult to condemn either. The problem of the islands had been rendered far more ...”