Give me chastity and continence, prayed the youthful Augustine, but do not give it yet. Perhaps the young Tony Benn, slithering up the greasy poll, made similar entreaties. For this, his fascinating first volume of diaries, is the story of an attractive, vital, boundlessly energetic young man having the egocentric time of his life without a thought for the morrow, except to move onwards and upwards. 'I did not, at that time, have a real socialist understanding of the structure of our society,' he writes in the Foreword. 'That came as a result of my experiences over many years.' Hence these are to be seen as 'the diaries of a socialist-in-the-making'. What they read like, however, are the diaries of an effective politician on the make.

LRB 26 November 1987 | PDF Download