Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character, edited by Frank Field
This book consists of a 50-page introduction in which Frank Field, shrewdly though large- ly in eulogistic vein, analyses the character and political principles of Clement Attlee, followed by 28 essays, many of them book reviews or articles first published in the Observer, in which Attlee considers various of his contemporaries, from Lansbury and Keir Hardie to Aneurin Bevan and Montgomery. Field argues that these articles are uniquely revealing of the values which shaped Attlee’s own career and his understanding of ‘the collective nature of leadership in a free, and in particular, a social democratic society’. This claim is, on the whole, well-justified. He also maintains that the essays are ‘a joy to read … a set of literary crown-jewels … I am struck in these miniature portraits by the beauty of Attlee’s language.’
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