Extracts
From Francis Beckett’s Gordon Brown (2007):
Maybe it’s because, in England, the adjective “dour” always gets attached to the noun “Scotsman,” that the public perception of Gordon Brown is the opposite of the truth. In private he’s an amusing, erudite man with a quiet, musical and attractive dark brown voice, a low, gurgling laugh which you hear often, and almost stately manners.
From Francis Beckett’s The Great City Academy Fraud (2007):
What city academies represent is a return to the idea that the rich should contribute voluntarily, rather than through the tax system. But there is a new twist. The sponsor can get all the things a nineteenth century philanthropist could get, and which Attlee grudged him: control of how the money is spent, a “monument” to himself, the gratitude of the recipients. But unlike a nineteenth century philanthropist, he does not have to pay the cost of the thing he is “giving” – or even a substantial contribution towards the cost.
From Francis Beckett and David Hencke’s The Survivor: Tony Blair in Peace and War (2004):
"So Tony Blair gobbled up the theories of the management gurus. And what they said to him was: tear down all the bureaucratic civil service structures, all the paraphernalia of meetings and minutes and consulting; do it like the business leaders we admire - on the hoof, in your shirtsleeves, latte in one hand and mobile phone in the other. Run Great Britain plc as though it were a city investment company."
From Francis Beckett’s Laurence Olivier (2005):
"Archie Rice [in John Osborne's The Entertainer] was everything Olivier would have been without his prodigious talent: a man who never felt quite real except when on stage, a serial adulterer, and camp as a row of tents.
From Francis Beckett’s Enemy Within (1998):
"The Daily Worker was the first newspaper to identify Oswald Mosley as a fascist, when he was still in the Labour Party. This achievement is not as remarkable as it sounds. If you call everyone a fascist you must hit a winner eventually."
From Francis Beckett’s Macmillan:
Harold Macmillan was the bridge along which we walked from Edwardian England to Thatcher’s Britain; from wartime austerity to the swinging sixties. He was the last gentleman premier, the last to have seen the inside of a Flanders trench, the last to have stood side by side with Winston during the war and shared his fears and dangers, the last to have known Lloyd George and grown up with the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. But he was the first to understand the radically changed world, to realise the power of television and learn its techniques, to know what Harold Wilson meant by the ‘white heat of technology.’