His father, Joseph Beardsall Crosland, was a senior official at the War Office, and his mother, Jessie Raven, was an academic.

[2] He grew up in north London and was educated at Highgate School and at Trinity College, Oxford, obtaining a second class honours degree in Classical Moderations in Greek and Latin Literature.

He then became an intelligence officer gathering information for several months in the front line about troop movements at the Battle of Monte Cassino, and was also briefly involved in the Allied invasion of southern France as part of Operation Rugby in August 1944.

With Callaghan eliminated, Crosland's second wife wrote in her 1982 biography, he voted for George Brown in the second ballot, although with zero enthusiasm, and with little interest about the result, as he was opposed to both of the candidates now standing for the party leadership.

Although critical of Harold Wilson, and angry with him for his 1960 challenge to Gaitskell for the party leadership, Crosland respected him as a political operator.

In November 1964 Crosland and Brown told Wilson and Callaghan that ruling out devaluation was a mistake in the face of the economic crisis then under way.

[8][9] In her biography published in 1982, Susan Crosland said her husband had told her "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England.

Widespread protests, which erupted immediately, soon united a large number of influential people from across a wide spectrum from left-wing militant students to mildly conservative vice-chancellors.

He was instrumental in changing Transport policy on British Rail to be a higher fare fast intercity passenger service rather than its previous role as a general freight common carrier.

After his elimination, he switched his support to the eventual winner James Callaghan, who duly rewarded Crosland by appointing him Foreign Secretary on 8 April 1976.

"[18] Crosland benefited from the patronage of Hugh Dalton, who, in 1951, wrote to Richard Crossman: "Thinking of Tony, with all his youth and beauty and gaiety and charm...

He remarried on 7 February 1964 to Susan Catling, an American from Baltimore resident in London whom he had met in 1956,[21] and, in contrast to his first marriage, this was very happy and contented.

He insisted on taking the then American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a football fan, to Blundell Park to watch Grimsby Town play Gillingham in April 1976 when the two met for the first time.

[25] In December 1976, when Kissinger bowed out after the Republican defeat, he watched a football match with Crosland at Stamford Bridge between Chelsea and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

In the book he outlines the need for socialism to adapt to modern circumstances – a context from which the use of the term "revisionism" has its origins in Britain, despite the gradualism associated with the Fabian Society since the end of the nineteenth century.

Labour revisionism was a powerful ideological tendency within the Party in the 1950s and 1960s, taking intellectual sustenance from the Crosland book, and political leadership from Hugh Gaitskell.

The goal was to reformulate socialist principles, and bring the Labour Party policies up to date with the changing British society and economy.

Themes of destroying or overthrowing the rich and elite were downplayed in favour of policies of high taxation, more widespread educational opportunity, and expanded social services.

In the 1951 essay "The Transition from Capitalism" he claimed that "by 1951 Britain had, in all the essentials, ceased to be a capitalist country" as a result of the establishment of the welfare state.

Crosland and his wife bought a converted mill at Adderbury in Oxfordshire in 1975, as well as having a home at Lansdowne Road in Notting Hill, London.

On the afternoon of 13 February 1977, Crosland was at his home in Adderbury, working on a paper on the Rhodesian situation, and was planning that evening to complete a major foreign policy speech on détente.