Most memoirs from Labour politicians are from the big players. Of Labour's leaders, Callaghan's memoir Time and Chance is undoubtedly the best. Wilson's are essentially histories of the two government's he led, 1964-70 and 1974-76, frankly are not the best available. 'Clam' Attlee's memoirs are worse giving hardly anything away at all. Other leaders, such as Ramsay MacDonald, Michael Foot, George Lansbury did not write memoirs.

Many of the best are by those who did not quite become leader. Hugh Dalton's three-volume work is fantastic for the 1920s-1950s. Manny Shinwell's several volumes of memoirs are readable, though all are partisan and some are better than others (he wrote his first in his sixties and seemed to notch up another every decade subsequently - he lived to be over one hundred). Herbert Morrison's ghosted memoir is somewhat less good. Of the next generations, Douglas Jay's Change and Fortune is good for the 1950s-1960s, Barbara Castle's Fighting All the Way is readable, passionate, but not always accurate, George Brown's In My Way, is irrepressible, and the best are arguably Denis Healey's The Time of My Life, Roy Jenkins's A Life at the Centre.

Also worth reading are the memoirs of the less prominent politicians. Bill Rodgers's Fourth among Equals gives fascinating insights into Gaitskellite machine-politics and the Fabian social-democratic wing of the Labour Party. Roy Mason's Paying the Price and Joel Barnett's Inside the Treasury are also underrated.

Perhaps the most fascinating is John Golding's recently published posthumous memoir Hammer of the Left, which gives the inside story of the fightback of the Labour moderates against Tony Benn and Militant from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. It is, if one can use the phrase, the antidote to the Benn diaries of the period.

Of trade unionists the most readable and interesting include Frank Chapple's Sparks Fly and Eric Hammond's Maverick! Both are written by former leaders of the electricians union, now part of Amicus and cover from the 1950s to the 1980s. Jack Jones's Union Man is also a must. The worst are pretty bad and include Clive Jenkins's awful All Against the Collar.

Four of the most readable memoirs come from the pens of Joe Haines, Harold Wilson's press secretary 1969-76 and Bernard Donoughue, Head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit 1974-79. Haines, acerbic, and eminently readable, wrote the devastating Politics of Power in 1977 and recently published Glimmers of Twilight, like the first, the story of the Wilson governments from behind the curtain. Donoughue's Prime Minister, the conduct of Policy under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan has likewise been recently supplemented by The Heat of the Kitchen.

One of the most moving stories is Jack Lawson's A Man's Life, written in 1932. Lawson, a miner who became a Labour cabinet minister under Attlee in 1945 and his memoir, unusually, deals mainly with his earlier life. The most moving stories must also include David Blunkett's On a Clear Day and Jennie Lee's My Life with Nye. Lee, an inspirational politician in her own right, sacrificed much of her later political career for her husband, Nye Bevan. This is her story, of her early life and subsequently of life with Bevan. Anyone who really wants to understand the Labour party should read it.

The wittiest are probably Roy Hattersley's Who Goes Home, tellingly lacking in an index, but full of hilarious anecdotage, followed, surprisingly to the many now who will never have heard of him, by Dick Marsh's 'Off the Rails.' Marsh was a young technocratic and telegenic Transport Secretary and Minister of Power in the 1960s under Wilson. Tipped for the top, he was a Wilson protege who rose too quickly for his own good, made (good) jokes at Wilson's expense in Cabinet, was sacked, and ended up as Chairman of British Rail in the 1970s and a crossbencher in the Lords.