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“... have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ‘social ownership’. By the time Benn contested the leadership in 1988, he was a spent force. Voted off the NEC in 1993, he could only ...”

“... all, the SNP’s leaders are sufficiently well versed in the jurisprudence of their late colleague Neil MacCormick, the professor of public law at Edinburgh and another gradualist, to perceive the ‘post-sovereignty’ parameters of 21st-century interdependence. But did Cameron really blunder? Probably, insofar as he takes seriously his responsibilities as ...”

“... Peacock dramatised Harrison’s relations with younger scholars – notably, D.S. MacColl, R.A. Neil and Francis Cornford – as painful scenarios in which she was always the loser. Yet Harrison, too, was inclined to see herself as repeatedly betrayed and heartbroken. Beard is uncomfortable with her claims to victim status, and hurries over these unedifying ...”

“... pressing for reforms, many of which are still strongly contested in this country to this day.’ For her, morality is rooted in the individual and the family: he is less clear on this, but it seems he would root it in class, though his conception is not strictly Marxist. Both adore the memory of their fathers. From hers, she takes a dedication to ...”

“... the prevailing tone when she sent her notorious email on 9/11, pointing out it was ‘a very good day to get out anything we want to bury’. But then even the saintly Bill Deedes readily admitted that, when he was Macmillan’s information minister in the early 1960s, at his weekly conference of chief press officers, ‘if their news was bad, we tried to tie ...”

“... least in making their choice between parties. The Conservative share in the polls in 1987 on the day Tim Bell rode into Downing Street on a white charger was 44 per cent. One week later, after the expenditure of all the serious money on advertising, their share of votes came out at ... 43 per cent. It wasn’t the media in 1987 which gave Mrs Thatcher her ...”

“... ideas of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, they did as they were told. (The celibacy rule is to this day so tightly enforced that there are separate times for men and women to use Camp Ashraf’s petrol station.) Members were urged to transfer their passions from their former spouses to their leaders, the Rajavis. Aware that people were becoming sexually ...”

“... startled, hurt, a little scared. We asked to see some ID. He’d lost his wallet earlier that day, he said. But he could get us some ID from his mum’s house in West London – if we’d just wait a couple of days. He started to get angry. How could we not trust him? It was because he went to Oxford, wasn’t it? Because he was posh. It was so unfair, he ...”

“... had good reason. Little blame can be attached to the politicians who cultivated Maxwell, such as Neil Kinnock. How could any Labour leader afford to alienate the owner of the biggest Labour-supporting newspaper? As for the Mirror’s journalists, working for Maxwell was no doubt grim – but most newspapers have proprietors who are less than ideal. There ...”

“... and the Civil War. Their agenda was nationalist rather than social or economic. On St Patrick’s Day 1943 de Valera broadcast a version of his dream for Ireland: ‘a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic ...”

“... which collapsed in the early Nineties, while Scargill continued to hang on – as he does to this day – to the presidency of a union which is now in toto less than half the size of the Yorkshire area he inherited in 1973. This support never went without saying. Other figures, less flamboyant though undoubtedly more loyal, could rely on the Party for more ...”

“... outbursts of unmotivated violence. Occasionally his characters simply die out of the blue: ‘One day Orlov stuffed himself with mashed peas and died. Krylov, having heard the news, also died. And Spiridonov died regardless. And Spiridonov’s wife fell from the cupboard and also died. And the Spiridonov children drowned in a pond.’ ‘Characters’ is ...”

“... an entirely reasonable feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the ...”

“... with Mandela. There are politicians whose ability to be neutral is even more suspect – Neil Kinnock heads a Labour Party team, for example; rock stars come to clean up on the South African circuit so long off-limits to them; endless self-appointed ‘monitoring’ teams from black American universities; old South African exiles like the actor ...”

“... one, as his earlier Devolving English Literature implies, more firmly focused on a latter-day drama in which the last act of the dismantling of Empire is played out in terms of the breakup of the United Kingdom. Appropriately, the main proposition, reiterated through a number of carefully linked, not to say insistent and repetitive essays, is starkly ...”