[2] Pimlott also recognised that Dalton was a genuine radical and an inspired politician; a man, to quote his old friend and critic John Freeman, "of feeling, humanity, and unshakeable loyalty to people which matched his talent.

[4] Dalton's decision as an undergraduate to join the Labour Party gave him the reputation of being a "class traitor" and an "Etonian renegade" who had abandoned the traditional "Establishment" values of his Eton-Cambridge education; many Conservatives of similar public school and Oxbridge background always had a special distaste for him.

"[8] Unlike many others involved in the Labour Party in the interwar period, Dalton was no pacifist, and instead embraced the idea that collective security and armed deterrence were the best means of avoiding another world war.

[14] In his 1928 book Towards the Peace of Nations, Dalton praised the forced population exchanges between Turkey and Greece in 1922–1923 for its "cumulatively good" consequences and recommended a similar policy towards Eastern Europe.

[29] In a letter to Robert Vansittart, Dalton wrote: "It was amazing how some people, otherwise intelligent, had a fixture about Russia and seemed almost to prefer that this country should be defeated in war without Russian aid rather than win with it".

[31] As the Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov frequently praised the League of Nations and collective security in his speeches, it was under these grounds, rather than support for communism, that Dalton advocated an Anglo-Soviet alliance.

[30] Dalton believed it was possible for Britain to pressure Poland and Romania into granting the Red Army transit rights to aid Czechoslovakia, which did not have a direct border with the Soviet Union.

[30] Dalton was well aware that the Yezhovschina had wrecked the Red Army at least for the moment, but still felt that the Soviet Union was the only power capable of engaging with Germany in Eastern Europe, and was worth having as an ally against the Reich.

"[36] Like most other British anti-appeasers, Dalton did not want a war with the Reich, and instead believed an alliance of the Soviet Union, France, and Britain would be sufficient to cause Germany to back down from its demands on Czechoslovakia.

[23] The British historian Louise Shaw noted that Dalton like the other anti-appeasers advocated a foreign policy that made sense in deterrence terms, but did not address the practical questions if the crisis turned to war.

[38] On the evening of 30 March 1939, Dalton along with Arthur Greenwood visited 10 Downing Street where they were informed by Chamberlain that he planned to announce the British "guarantee" of Poland in a speech in the House of Commons the next day.

[43] But Dalton was not a partisan of the Soviet line, and in July 1939 told Maisky that his government was partly to blame for the slow pace of the talks and the failure to reach a joint Anglo-Soviet "guarantee" of Romania.

[14] At a party hosted by Count Raczyński at the Polish embassy on 18 November 1939, Dalton first met Colonel Colin Gubbins who had served with the British military mission in Poland and had escaped via Romania.

[51] During the Phoney War, Dalton cultivated contacts with anti-Chamberlain Conservative MPs such as Leo Amery, Robert Boothby, and Anthony Eden, suggesting that they vote with Labour against the government should an opportune moment present itself.

[56] The British historian Matthew Frank called Dalton "a particularly duplicitous, cunning and vain politician with an overbearing and forceful personality" who exercised more influence on government policy than what his titles would suggest.

[58] At a meeting on 1 July 1940, Dalton put forward to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and the service ministers his case for the Ministry of Economic Warfare having its own armed wing.

[62] The American historian Douglas Porch described Dalton as a "true radical" who thought that most British Army officers were too conservative to embrace guerrilla warfare, and encouraged the recruitment of unconventional people.

[71] The round flight of 1,500 miles was to Poland in a Whitley bomber nearly exhausted the fuel reserves of the plane and the three Polish agents were parachuted by mistake into the Warthegau ruled by the violently anti-Polish Gauleiter Arthur Greiser.

[71] Dalton did not seem to understand that Poland was at the extreme range of British aircraft and that his plans to fly in a massive number of weapons and agents, as the prelude for sending in an entire airborne division with the aim of launching a revolt, were unrealistic.

Dalton and Gubbins met with Edvard Beneš, the president of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, and his intelligence chief František Moravec, and secured the promise that a dozen Czech servicemen would volunteer for SOE.

[83] On 29 August 1941, Dalton declared that his policy towards the Chetniks was to have SOE offer maximum support in form of arms and ammunition, and that "the guerrilla and sabotage bands now active in Yugoslavia should show sufficient resistance to cause constant embarrassment to the occupying forces".

[85] At this stage in the war, SOE worked exclusively with the Chetniks as no-one in the British government were aware in the summer of 1941 of the existence of rival Communist Partisan resistance movement led by Josip Broz Tito.

[89] De Gaulle's response was to simply ignore Dalton's veto and to send out Jean Moulin in January 1942 with orders to persuade all of the non-Gaullist resistance groups to accept his claim to be the leader of Free France.

[91] This was especially problematic for Dalton who had presented Yugoslavia as a success story for SOE as he argued that the bands of guerillas up in the mountains of Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro had tied down a number of German divisions that otherwise be used in North Africa or against the Soviet Union.

[91] In a letter to Churchill on 11 December 1941, Dalton claimed that SOE had brokered a truce between Mihailović and Tito, the morale of the guerrillas and the combined force of the Chetniks and the Partisans were "immobilising no less than 7 German and 12 Italian divisions".

[121] In February 1944, Dalton complained about the slow pace of reaching a common position with the Dominions on trade, declaring "it is incredible how these rambling discussions succeed one another with no new arguments and no one ever changing sides and never any firm decisions".

[101] The Labour Australian prime minister John Curtin was committed to a Keynesian policy of seeking full employment after the war as he vowed that Australia would never be ravaged by a depression again.

[133] In this way, Dalton played an important role in triggering what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine as the United States was informed that Britain would cease subsiding Greece as of 1 April 1947, and if the Americans wanted to stop the Greek Communists from winning the civil war, they would have to take action.

[19] Food subsidies were maintained at high wartime levels in order to restrain living costs, while taxation structures were altered to benefit low-wage earners, with some 2.5 million workers taken out of the tax system altogether in Dalton's first two budgets.

"[145] Michael Bloch, on the other hand, thinks that Dalton's love for Rupert Brooke, whom he met at Cambridge University's Fabian Society, went beyond the platonic, citing bike rides in the countryside and sleeping naked under the stars.