- Paperback: 592 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (24 April 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140286918
- ISBN-13: 978-0140286915
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 988,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Sir Stafford Cripps has not lacked biographers. There have been some half-dozen, including two within the last five years. But Peter Clarke's The Cripps Version is, as the title implies, the first to be based on full access to Cripps' personal papers. Where other books on Cripps have painted portraits from the outside--from public records and from the papers of other politicians--Clarke is able to see things from inside out, using the voluminous personal and unofficial correspondence left by Cripps, as well as a series of his diaries. Cripps was an unusually off-the-record politician, and Clarke's famous forensic skills of reconstruction, used to such great effect in his earlier books on Edwardian "new liberalism" and on JM Keynes, are brought to bear on this complex man, who was a radical hero of the 1930s, war-time shuttle diplomat in the Soviet Union and India, and post-war Chancellor in the era of rationing and devaluation.
The book concentrates on Cripps in and out of office after 1940. We get through the first 50 years of his life in 80 pages, leaving Clarke plenty of space to unpick with great precision the principal events and controversies of the 1940s: the rivalry with Churchill, the coaxing of Stalin, the placating of Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, and the management of the post-war British economy. This is political biography at its very best. If Cripps emerges as a less colourful character from this definitive work, he is also revealed as a more credible politician, who achieved his ends by a combination of hard work, charm, noblesse oblige, a strong Christian ethic and only a smattering of ideology. --Miles Taylor --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Like almost every mid-20th-century politician of note, Stafford Cripps had the dubious honour of an epigram from Churchill: "There, but for the grace of God, goes God". The wit of the remark is in its accurate summation of Cripps' astonishing talents, and the personal failings that were to deprive him of the highest office. Beginning his professional life as a lawyer, he went on to become Ambassador to Russia in 1940. In 1942 he was sent as special envoy to India and the report he wrote was to prove a watershed on that country's road to independence. In Labour's post-war administration, Cripps was president of the Board of Trade, and from 1947-50, Chancellor of the Exchequer. This authoritative biography was written with complete access to private and public papers.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Peter Clarke is to be congratulated for his well researched, objective and fascinating biography of one of the true giants of the Labour Party. My lasting memory will be of the coverage of the role Stafford Cripps played in bringing an end to Colonial rule in India. As the book amply demonstrates there is so much more to Cripps than his period as Chancellor of the Exchequer at the tail-end of the Attlee Government.
My interest was sparked by Ben Pimlott's review of the book in the Guardian, "Tighten your belts. Penny pincher or saint ?"
But it still remains a mystery how Stafford Cripps became a hero of the Labour Party, one of the big five figures of the Attlee Government and came close to becoming party leader. On my reading of Peter Clarke's work Cripps was not a major Labour Party ideologue nor a key contributor to the organisation of the party's victory at the 1945 election. Yet he was a man popular with the party who impressed and influenced, and sometimes infuriated, those he came into close contact with including diplomats, civil servants and political opponents.
I would have expected to have seen greater and deeper coverage of Cripps relationship with Attlee. The likelihood is that Peter Clarke told all there is to tell and there was not the dynamic or sparky relationship between them that has marked so many other relationships of Labour leaders.
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