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“... Tony Crosland’s epoch-making book The Future of Socialism was published in 1956. That Roy Hattersley’s aim is to don the master’s mantle in the late 1980s is evident not only from his book’s subtitle, but also from his brief account of a conversation he had with Tony Crosland a week before the latter’s fatal stroke ...”

“... as any blue-blood. And it seems that in a few years we shall all know a lot about the House of Hattersley. We are told that The Maker’s Mark is ‘based on the true story of a real family and is the first of a trilogy’. Written by Roy Hattersley, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, the narrative opens at ...”

“... do in fact only occur in America. Lower, both in scale and register, was the experience of seeing Roy Hattersley cruising the upper galleries of the ghastly neo-brutalist Madison Square Garden. Mr Hattersley is far too corporeal to be called a ghost, and most delegates wouldn’t have known him from Banquo anyway, but ...”

“... Roy Hattersley’s book is an engaging account of what life was like for those caught in the poverty trap in Britain during the Thirties and Forties. The Hattersley family eventually climbed out: Enid, his mother, became Lady Mayoress of Sheffield and Roy a possible future prime minister ...”

“... for harassing blacks; and, for good measure, I had criticised two Labour MPs, Lena Jeger and Roy Hattersley. I felt that Mrs Jeger had supported the policy I favoured with a silly argument and that Roy Hattersley supported it with too little enthusiasm. Foot was staring out of window, disconsolate that he had ...”

“... of greatness because he is so self-obsessed he can’t understand that the game was up long ago. Roy Hattersley has rightly drawn praise for this portrait: he is better able than most to understand how powerful a parliamentary presence someone of Lloyd George’s rhetorical gifts could be while also doing justice to his dazzling unscrupulousness. There ...”

“... An obvious title would have been Blood and Fire, but that was bagged a couple of years ago by Roy Hattersley for his massive biography of William and Catherine Booth, the Army’s founders. William, the ‘Fool of God’ who made such diverse sinners as Cecil Rhodes and Margot Asquith kneel and pray with him in railway carriages, remains something of ...”

“... as party leader. He got 71 per cent of the votes in the new electoral college; the runner-up – Roy Hattersley – got 19 per cent. Healey did not even bother to stand. Michael Leapman does not duck the fact that Kinnock has made some mistakes and had some failures. In the 1984-85 miners’ strike, for example, he got the worst of both worlds. Many of ...”

“... figure of Harold Lever. Apart from myself, two other victims of Barbara’s midnight spleen are Roy Hattersley and John Silkin. John Silkin, a ‘failure’ at the Department of the Environment, is forgiven in a footnote because of his ‘success’ at the Ministry of Agriculture. Perhaps for once she is too generous. Because of the General Election of ...”

“... pouring out insults to him on the phone’. There are occasional lunches and dinners à deux with Roy Jenkins, sometimes at the Connaught (‘another demonstration of what he calls, with a smile, his “expensive tastes” ’) and sometimes at No 11 Downing Street, at one of which ‘we agreed about a number of things, notably on our contempt for Jim ...”

“... book – the extent to which the modern Labour Party, New Labour, is Kinnock’s creation – Roy Hattersley wrote last year that ‘the Blair Project is not a continuation of Neil Kinnock’s reforms. Kinnock wanted to establish a new and improved form of socialism. Blair believes he has found an alternative’ (Tribune, 28 September). For ...”

“... de-regulation and demotion of union rights has come to stay. Indeed Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley are making it increasingly plain that many items of ‘Thatcherism’ would not be simply reversed by an incoming Labour government. And while there may be a specific British dimension to this socio-economic lurch to the right, we can see that ...”

“... 1981, and the launch of the manifesto that came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration. When Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and I met together that morning, we were clear in our intention: in breaking the mould of contemporary politics, we would create a new radical centre, push the Labour Party into third place, change the electoral system ...”

“... themselves describe as a major breakdown in police-community relations. Faced with this rule, Roy Hattersley has skirted the issue of policing with concerned but imprecise condemnations of bad housing, fiscal neglect and unemployment. This is an economistic language which speaks of riot as the inevitable explosion, the moment when the spark hit the ...”

“... and turned on Radio 4 in the kitchen: listening to both, I scurried from one to the other. When Roy Hattersley was being interviewed on the box, for example, I retired to the kitchen to listen to Brian Redhead and David Butler. At least I have now seen a swingometer, although since the set was black and white, I only learned the following day that the ...”