Delightful from start to finish, his autobiography is an education in itself, disheartening only in its implicit suggestion that it takes the near-breakdown of civilisation to produce a generation of politicians who can appreciate the value of what was almost lost. But perhaps we should try to demonstrate its quality with an initial quotation. Try this:

"I was worried by a streak of intolerance in Gaitskell's nature: he tended to believe that no one could disagree with him unless they were either knaves or fools. Rejecting Dean Rusk's advice, he would insist on arguing to a conclusion rather than to a decision. Thus he would keep a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet going, long after he had obtained its consent to his proposals, because he wanted to be certain that everyone understood precisely why he was right."

That comes from page 154 of my paperback edition, and there is something to equal it on almost every other page of the book. One doesn't say that cultivation ensures political acumen. If it did, Neville Chamberlain would have been the most effective Prime Minister in British history. But an empty mind is rarely reassuring. A cultivated man across the whole range of the arts, Healey was a gift from war to peace. If there had been no war, the dazzling Double First in Greats might have gone on to be an academic, a scholar, a critic, a writer, a star broadcaster, or any combination of those five things. But the war sent him into politics: real politics, Labour politics, not the Communism he had briefly embraced when too young to know the difference. (Sir Isaiah Berlin once said that most of those bright young people who enrolled in the Communist Party in pre-war Britain didn't really want a revolution: they were just liberals who wanted to feel serious.) In parliament, Healey's mere presence on the Labour front bench was enough to make the Conservatives look like philistines. Not all of them were, but few of those who weren't had a mind as well-furnished as his. Their culture was part of their inheritance. He had to acquire his, and went on acquiring it throughout his career, out of a passion that was never stilled even by the crushing, necessary boredom of political committee rooms. So it was unsurprising, if gratifying, that he marked his retirement with one of those rare books of political memoirs that connect politics to culture. A book like Noel Annan's Our Age, while of comparable quality, is really coming from the other direction, in which the going is far easier. At the end of the war, Annan, as a leading light in the Allied Control Commission, played a key role in fostering the reconstruction of Germany's civilised institutions. It was a difficult task requiring much tact and ingenuity; but that was as far as he went with politics. Post war, Annan was a cultural grandee, which for a man with his qualifications was easy street. Healey, once he had made his choice, never saw the ivory tower again.