Wherever he went, Denis Healey took photographs. From a Brownie box camera, which ignited the boyhood passion, he soared up to an Olympus, snapping all the way. More than 42,000 photographs and slides eventually filled his house in Sussex. At summits, banquets and college dinners what other guests saw of him was mostly a toothy grin beneath a large flashing lens, and over it those extraordinary eyebrows, God's gift to cartoonists, twitching up and down. A photographer places himself at a certain distance from events; so did he. Though caught up for 40 years in the whirl of British politics, and especially Labour's sempiternal internecine struggles, he attracted no clique or claque around him, and did not try to. He said he went to the Members' Tea Room in the House of Commons, the Labour Party's den of plots, only when he actually wanted a cup of tea. Though heartily gregarious, he was politically a loner who beat his own path.
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