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time to write the definitive biography of his mentor
Nye Bevan, a similarly exhaustive tome on H.G. Wells
was to follow later.
It was the old rival Denis Healey who said that a politician
needs a “hinterland”, outside cultural interests to
keep them human. No-one could ever accuse Foot of
not cultivating his own spiritual and mental landscape.
The selection of essays here are a testament to the
man’s mercurial mind, the breadth of his intellectual
scope. Taken from over a half-century, only a small
number touch on purely political ‘issues’ – nuclear
weapons, the Soviet Union, Irish nationalism. Foot’s
preferred form was to discuss the life, work and ideas
of an individual man or woman, and a small majority
here are portraits of political figures, usually taken from
reviews of biographies or collections from their own
work. It takes in leading figures from Labour history
and earlier British socialism, from Bevan and Bevin
to Robert Owen and William Morris, the still earlier
radicalisms of Tom Paine and Charles James Fox. Irish
and Indian independence are well represented with
Indira Ghandi and Daniel O’Connell, as is feminism
with Emilene Pankhurst and Brigid Brophy. Yet at the
same time there are a great many portraits of writers
and characters not best known for their politics – Oscar
Wilde, James Joyce, Rebecca West, the Romantic poets
and Heinrich Heine – not to mention Peggy Aschroft.
That the politicians segue so well into the writers is
BUY Michael Foot books online from and
a testament to the well- rounded totality of Foot’s mind
and vision. The struggle for truth and freedom are as
important in the literary sphere as in the party political,
maybe more so. Aesthetics, beauty, form and style are
at the very least equal to politics in his thoughts and
enthusiasms. In discussing Edmund Wilson’s biography
of Rousseau, more reference is made to relevant
quotations from Byron than to any theoretical road to
Robespierre. Essays on the history of Hampstead common,
and the infinite wonders of Venice, perhaps the
least ‘political’ here, are probably the most beautifully
written, with an evocation of time, space and place
which is truly involving, even moving.
Foot writes in a style both cultured and clear, mildly
mischievous, totally lacking pomposity, and wearing
its very evident learning lightly. A passion, quiet yet
pronounced, reserved but unmistakable, is evident at
all times. Personal recollections lightly pepper the essays
on those he knows and knew, while the same easy,
almost conversational style flows similarly into those
from centuries past, creating the pleasing impression
that Foot was on nodding terms with Coleridge and
Morris just as he was with Richard Crossman and John
Smith (which, in his life of the mind, he perhaps always
has been).
A clue there perhaps that it takes a duller man than
this to succeed in the grubby world of leading a political
party. The decency consistently evident in his prose
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