Michael Foot

Michael Foot former leader of the Labour Party, is the author of many books, of which the best-known is a life of Aneurin Bevan.

Letter

Devil take the hindmost

14 December 1995

It is monstrous that John Sutherland should have concluded his diatribe against H.G. Wells with the speculation that ‘if he had lived to witness it … he might have disbelieved the evidence of what the Nazis did’ (LRB, 14 December 1995). He did witness a good deal of what the Nazis did, and he condemned it more consistently, more comprehensively and at least as soon as any other English writer...

Erratic Star

Michael Foot, 11 May 1995

Tory political philosophers are not easily come by, even in the atmosphere of intellectual body-snatching unloosed by the Peter-house School of historians. Confronted with the raw clash between rich and poor brought about by Thatcherite-Lawsonite-Majorite policies, Adam Smith would have recoiled. The social policy he sought to develop was more civilised than anything on offer today from the Howards and the Heseltines, the Portillos and the Lilleys.

Devil take the hindmost

John Sutherland, 14 December 1995

Among other certain things (death, taxes etc) is the rule that no work of science fiction will ever win the Booker Prize – not even the joke 1890s version. H.G. Wells’s The Time...

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Darling Clem

Paul Addison, 17 April 1986

British history is very English: written mainly by the English and about England. But Trevor Burridge is a Welshman by birth and a citizen of Canada. He teaches at the French-speaking University...

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Second Last Leader

Ian Gilmour, 7 June 1984

The Labour Party was born in 1900, and died in 1983. There can be argument over the exact date of its death. Some may maintain that it did not die until about 1990, others that electorally it...

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Michael Foot’s Fathers

D.A.N. Jones, 4 December 1980

If Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot had achieved Cabinet rank together in the 1960s, the United Kingdom would be in better shape now. ‘That is my truth,’ as Bevan used to...

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