Andrew Adonis

Andrew Adonis gives her own account of the failed Lib-Lab coalition talks that followed the historic 2010 election. An important insider account of the dramatic negotiations, it also offers the author's view on what the future holds for all three parties.

The Coalition and Beyond

5 Days in May

Updated to take account of the 1992 election and ensuing developments, this book is a guide to Parliament's contemporary role and operation and to prospects for reform in the 1990s.

Parliament Today

Keith Thomas

Roy Jenkins was a dominating figure in British politics across the four decades before his death in 2003, with an impact and legacy greater than many prime ministers of the period. His name is synonymous with the rise of the liberal society in the 1960s and beyond, and with the development ofprogressive social democratic politics spanning the forty years between the death of his mentor Hugh Gaitskell and the premiership of his friend - and some would say protege - Tony Blair.These essays, by friends and associates of Roy Jenkins from every phase of his life, chart his remarkable career with insight, anecdote and empathy. Each contributor writes from a close relationship with their subject, and with unique authority.They bring to life the 1960s 'Iron Chancellor'; the model progressive Home Secretary under Wilson and Callaghan; the first (and only) British President of the European Commission; the pioneer of the Social Democratic Party and much of the reshaping of British politics in the 1980s and 1990s; thefriend and mentor of Tony Blair; the Chancellor of Oxford University; and the acclaimed author and biographer, whose best-selling Churchill appeared more than fifty years after his first biography of Clement Attlee.The authors also recreate the remarkable circle of partisans and devotees, from politics and beyond, which surrounded Roy Jenkins from the mid-1960s until his death. At the heart of the Establishment, yet among its most effective reformers and critics; a son of the valleys who became a connoisseurof the best things in life, he was an object of the deepest loyalty and the fiercest antipathy - and among the most caricatured and celebrated figures of the day. This book is a testament to one of the most fascinating public figures of the post-war era.

A Retrospective

Roy Jenkins

David Butler

Tony Travers

Reviled by the public and disowned by politicians, the poll tax was the most celebrated political disaster in post-war Britain. This book tells the full story of the poll tax, from its conception to its demise.

The Politics of the Poll Tax

Failure in British Government

Parliament is at the centre of British political life. Designed as a guide for the student and the general reader, this text explains how it functions and how it has changed in the 1980s, with far-reaching consequences for British politics.

Stephen Pollard

A Class Act aims to explode the myth that Britain is becoming a classless society, by systematically examining the pillars of the new class structure - education, the monarchy, the armed forces, health, politics, housing and race.

The Myth of Britain's Classless Society

A Class Act

As a statesman, Ernest Bevin is second only to Churchill in impact and legacy. Born in abject poverty to a single mother, and with virtually no formal education, Bevin went on to become the founder of the largest trade union in British history and then made it to the top of politics and government. As Minister of Labour from 1940 to 1945, he was the nation’s wartime mobiliser-in-chief. Clement Attlee, Churchill’s Deputy Prime Minister, kept the wartime coalition in good administrative order, but it was the charismatic Bevin who really drove the domestic war effort. As post-war Foreign Secretary, Bevin was Britain’s last world power envoy and did much to thwart Stalin’s Soviet Union and to prevent Europe sinking back into conflict. No one did more to stabilise and democratise Europe and to pave the way for the European Union. In this major, wide-ranging new biography, Andrew Adonis brings to life one of our greatest statesmen – a politician whose light is often unjustly hidden beneath that of his more celebrated contemporaries.

Andrew Adonis

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