When Tony Benn left Parliament after 51 years he quoted his wife Caroline’s remark that now he would have "more time for politics." And so this has proved: in the first seven years of this century, he has helped reinvigorate national debate through public meetings, mass campaigns, and appearances in the media, passionately bringing moral and political issues to wide audiences. And throughout, as ever, he has been keeping his diaries.

Commenting on the demise of the New Labor project from the reelection of Tony Blair in 2001 to the ultimate foreign policy disaster of Iraq, he gives prescient accounts of the government’s by-passing of Cabinet, parliament, and the party, of the "war on terror," the debate about Islam, globalisation, and the changes in British society. Although he is no longer in power or in parliament, Tony Benn remains a figure of enormous respect whose direct views, honestly expressed, have often awakened the national conscience. His latest Diaries, human and challenging in turn, are an enthralling read.