34 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who joins me to talk about his new biography of Harold Wilson. He tells me about Wilson’s rocket-powered rise to the top, how he learned oratory on the hoof, why he might have been right to be paranoid… and what
On a family holiday almost 40 years ago I visited Winsford, the village on the edge of Exmoor where Ernest Bevin was born (and Boris Johnson was raised). Having read the first book in Alan Bullock’s scholarly three-volume biography, I’d become a convinced Bevinite (not to be confused with the followers of Nye Bevan, his
43 min listen
In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by Alan Johnson and Andrew Adonis to talk about the latter’s new biography of a neglected great of British political history: Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill. He was, in Andrew’s estimation, the man who did most to save Europe from Stalin. So why has Bevin been so forgotten? In
When the Beatles’ first authorised biographer, Hunter Davies, clinched the deal in 1967, his publisher remarked that ‘we know everything we could possibly know about the Beatles and they’ll disappear soon’. In that same year, the philosopher Bryan Magee adopted an incredulous tone in the Listener: ‘Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be
On the day that Tony Blair left the Commons chamber for the last time (to a standing ovation led by the leader of the opposition) I was moved from Education to Health and, a few days later, was to accompany the new prime minister on his first official engagement — to a hospital in Kingston-upon-Thames.
The BBC is grappling with a dilemma forced upon it by George Osborne when he was chancellor. From 2020 the Corporation will be forced to fund the full £745 million cost of providing a free TV licence to households where one resident is over 75. One of the most significant achievements of the Blair government
The separation between ‘members’ and ‘strangers’ always struck me as being one of the most archaic aspects of the House of Commons. When Natasha Barley, the brilliant director of the Children’s University in Hull, asked me (as the charity’s patron) to arrange a meeting with the Education Secretary, Damian Hinds, I felt obliged to accompany
Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor, Jock Cowan and Maurice Styles, postal workers for whom all events were viewed through the prism of ‘scientific socialism’. Communism gave them a philosophy by which to live their lives, and they were respected as
Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor, Jock Cowan and Maurice Styles, postal workers for whom all events were viewed through the prism of ‘scientific socialism’. Communism gave them a philosophy by which to live their lives, and they were respected as
H is For Hawk (Cape, £14.99) is the most ‘A for Amazing’ book I’ve read in a long while. Helen Macdonald weaves together three separate but related strands to produce a majestic tapestry. No reader could fail to be more interested in its primary subject by the end — or to be impressed by the beauty
Nothing illustrates the transformation in the working lives of professional footballers since the end of the maximum wage better than the story of how Bobby Moore only just made it to the West Ham ground for his first team debut against Manchester United. Today the players arrive from their luxury mansions insulated from the world
In his essay on the ‘Peculiarities of the English’, E.P. Thompson gave his theoretical definition of class: When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class,
Impatience for improvements in education is something I share. It is not a new phenomenon: in 1439 William Bingham, a London rector, petitioned Henry VI about the ‘great scarcity of masters of grammar’. What amazes me in the modern age is our collective complacency on education since the war. The independent National Foundation for Educational