As often happens, the hard road makes for the more revealing journey. There are not many appreciators of Verdi who have been Secretary of Defence. Healey's real university was not Oxford, where he was merely brilliant, but wartime Italy, where he learned the prickly realities of making decisions that could lead to no clear result, but only, at best, to something that might have been worse. The Anzio beach-master's bitter experience (the landing went smoothly, but Kesselring's counter-attack almost undid the whole enterprise) was behind the easy-seeming grace of Healey's slippered prose as old age approached: a grace - and here I switch to the present tense, because his style is still alive - that sins only in its undue fondness for semi-colons, and in the occasional dangling participle. But he isn't being lazy. He is just breathing out. After arguing for a living all his life, now at last he can settle down to be unanswerable.

Nevertheless he is careful to put in plenty of self-deprecation. Opponents are allowed their opinions. If it turns out, as it almost invariably does, that Healey's opinion was better, he tries not to crow. He forgets to record that in 1945 he advised his fellow Labourites not to be panicked by evidence "that our comrades on the Continent are being extremist". Annan does not forget: in Our Age he quotes chapter and verse of what Stalin was up to, while conceding that Healey changed his mind the following year. But on the whole Healey is convincing when he makes himself sound reasonable. Though he had the reputation of a bully among those he dominated, there was always evidence that the tolerance he claims in retrospect was genuinely there all along, if sometimes well shrouded. I remember that after the first televised session of the House of Lords in 1985, Healey called Lord Stockton's speech "a lulu". Since Lord Stockton had started life as Harold Macmillan, and Healey had publicly denounced Macmillan's part in the Suez enterprise as a disgrace, unstinting admiration for a shameless piece to camera was a pretty tolerant reaction to the decrepit lurk-man's latterday pose as a wise old bird who had seen it all.