Michael Foot: A Life Paperback – 3 Mar 2008

Review

'I was engrossed. Kenneth Morgan's superb portrait quickly takes shape…This is much more than another Labour biography. It is a portrait in bright oils of a master parliamentary literary-politcal agitator, in a society congenitally hard to rouse.' Prospect

'A joy to read, erudite, wry, sensitive and enlightening, packed with juicy items…from nearly a century of tumultuous personal, party and national events.' History Today

'Magnificent biography…Morgan has given us a book that is everything an authorized biography should be. It's compendious meticulously researched with the collaboration of its subject, and contains every fact you are ever likely to want to know about him.' Guardian

'A substantial work of history, not shy to explore Foot's human frailties…Yet it is also affectionate, conveying the warmth of Foot's generosity of spirit and his passions.' Scotsman

‘Beautifully written, and with facts and arguments skillfully assembled…a supremely honest scholar.' Financial Times

'Morgan's judgements of Foot are elegantly balanced…accurate narrative and careful analysis.' Roy Hattersley, The Observer

From the Back Cover

Michael Foot has had a long and fascinating life. He took part in twenty general elections between 1929 and 2005. He spans the worlds of Stafford Cripps and Tony Blair. At the age of 27, he became famous as joint author of Guilty Men, a legendary condemnation of pre-war Chamberlainite appeasement. Returned to parliament after the war, he became a dominant figure in the Labour left, a matchless pamphleteer, a scintillating parliamentary and mass orator, editor of Tribune, leading Bevanite and founder member of CND.

As a minister Foot also became a key player in Old Labour's last phase in the seventies, the architect of vital trade union legislation and leader of the House, and then for nearly three tormented years, leader of his party. Equally important, he was a cultured, literate man and a prolific author, whose literary and historical learning was vital to his political outlook, making him a civilising, inspirational force in British life and the international socialist movement. He symbolises a world we have lost.

Kenneth Morgan's authorised and finely written biography traces Foot's career from Cromwellian West Country origins to rebellious old age. It is based on a unique range of sources, many of them new, including extensive interviews with Michael Foot and with dozens of his colleagues in government, the Civil Service, the party and the press, and rich material in private papers and public records. It illuminates his complex, often turbulent, relationships with contemporaries such as Cripps and Lord Beaverbrook; Barbara Castle and Aneurin Bevan; Orwell and Koestler; Jim Callaghan, Tony Benn and Indira Gandhi. It also analyses in depth his wide-ranging literary interests, especially the importance for him of Dean Swift, Montaigne, Hazlitt, Byron and H.G.Wells; his contribution to the socialist idea; his relationship with his father, Isaac, and his family; and the emotional partnership with his beloved wife, Jill Craigie.

Michael Foot emerges here in all his complex, passionate humanity - radical critic, public dissenter, inveterate peacemonger, romantic (rather than ideological) socialist but also a man of profound culture, literary consciousness and deep-rooted patriotism, a unique public figure over seven decades, and one of the outstanding Englishmen of recent times.