Every weekend during the six years that he held various jobs in the 1960s Labor Cabinet of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Richard Crossman would retire to his 17th century country house near Oxford and dictate the week's experiences into a tape recorder. Nothing remarkable about that. Memoir writing and now tapingis a well-developed art, and Wilson himself had published his bland prime ministerial recollections in 1971.
Yet Crossman, a former Oxford don and journalist (he edited The New Statesman from 1970 to 1972) who died last spring, was devilishly unflattering in many of his reminiscences of Wilson, Britain's all-powerful civil service...
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