Volume 25, Number 17 · November 9, 1978
While England Sleeps
By Noel Annan
The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister Volume III, Secretary of State for Social Services, 1968-1970
by Richard Crossman
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1,039 pp., $22.95
None but the most intrepid of Anglophile American experts on British politics is likely to read every one of the 953 pages of text in this final volume of Richard Crossman's diary, kept while he was a minister in Harold Wilson's 1964-1970 government. Crossman taped his daily recollections in order to show what Cabinet government was really like and not what Sir Ivor Jennings and other worthy professors of the British constitution maintained it was. That meant that a lot of wearisome detail about his department and its battles with other departments over complicated clauses in legislative instruments relating to pension schemes and health benefits clogs the text. But since this is a diary it is not long before Crossman is describing intrigues, plots, rivalries, his family life, parties, and personalities in a far from boring manner.
Review, 4621 words
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