Michael Foot The Man and His Passion. Edited by June Purvis, Jonathan Freedland and Brian Brivati

When Michael Foot died in March this year, an era of British politics seemed to have ended. The tributes and outpourings of respect and admiration revealed that someone important in the life of the nation had departed. One of the shortcomings of the biographies of Michael Foot has been that, in the opinion of many who knew him, they do not get close enough to Michael the man, at home and as a private individual. The biographies do not do justice to the quality and passion of Foot's writing, nor to the critical faculties he brought to bear on the books and authors he read so voraciously. In the wake of Michael Foot's death earlier this year, this volume of appreciation of Michael Foot's extraordinary life includes essays on the orator, the politician, the writer and the man of great passions, as well as essays on his late wife, Jill Craigie, and their long marriage together. Contributors include Mark Seddon, Ian Aitken, William Keegan, Peter Henessy and Michael Cockeril.