These diaries...convey a fresh and vivid sense of the tensions and strains of this period

Donoughue's diaries of his time as political advisor to Jim Callaghan are proving gripping reading

Superb book... historians will plunder the Donughue diaries to gain an understanding of one of the great turning points in modern British history. But this book also has a huge contemporary resonance. It is very accessible to the general reader an I cannot recommend it highly enough

An admirable and important contribution to British history ... A copy of Donoughue's fascinating book should be sent to every minister in office

As an inside account of the collective political nervous breakdown suffered by the Labour movement in the late Seventies, these diaries have no equal

Bernard Donoughue's superb Downing Street diaries

An absorbing political thriller written by someone on the inside track

Donoughue's diaries of the death rattles of Labour's last administration should be essential reading at No. 10. Books such as this rise far above mere political gossip: they are essential reading for any member of British government

Historical biography's newest star

His conclusions neatly balance the equally pertinent questions of why Communist systems collapse, and why they lasted so long

One of Britain's leading experts on communism provides a grimly humorous and richly anecdotal study

Scholarly, well-paced and critical...few can match him for insider knowledge

Balanced, insightful, illuminated by intriguing detail and flashes of humour, this worldwide panorama is a miracle of compression

This superb book gives the history of the ideology and the reasons for its decline

It reads like Sovietology rendered by John le Carré

The book is well written with flashes of mordant humour and sufficient records of personal foibles and institutional stupidity to keep the reader going through some dreadful moments of human history