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of the free-born Englishman to include those without
property. This doyenne of dissenters is one himself, and
when he writes of, say, of the great early Parliamentary
radical Fox, or the still greater radical writer and pamphleteer
William Hazlitt , it is with the knowledge and
passion of someone who has devoted their whole life to
it, in both the intellectual and the practical sense. Foot
feels a truly organic lineage to this tribe, a lineage he is
more than entitled to.
An impassioned portrait of Heinrich Heine, one of
the longest essays here, is perhaps the best example of
the Foot’s infectious enthusiasm, his quiet passion, his
blending of the poetic and political. The personal too,
as he describes how Heine came to be his “hero” after
discovering her with a beautiful Yugoslavian girl with
whom he was once in love, before coming to know him
through what he saw as his modern day avatar, the cartoonist
Vicky, who had “every Heinite feature, the same
diminutive size, the same race, the same iconoclastic
temperament with a comparable artistic gift. He too,
like my Jewish girlfriend, knew Heine by heart, and
would summon his hero to his side whenever the political
battle was most ruthless or pitiless.” These personal
asides are – springboards to a fine, enraptured paen. As
someone who has never read Heine, I am inspired to do
so, much sooner than later. “He could never make up
his mind whether he was a poet or a politician”, says
Foot of Heine, and the reason for his particular connec-
BUY Michael Foot books online from and
tion with this writer becomes that bit clearer.
I have found myself slipping into the past tense in
writing this review, and yet Michael Foot is happily
still very much alive at the age of 96. When he does
pass away however, an age of passion, principle and
philosophy at the higher levels of politics will die with
him. It is unthinkable, literally unthinkable that a book
like this could appear today. The leaders of today’s
party political machines – slick, shallow, technocratic,
faux pragmatic and narrowly philistine – could not
begin to produce anything of the like. You may as well
expect Fearne Cotton to write an essay on the transgressive
ambiguities of the Velvet Underground. You
can just about see they ‘work in the same industry’,
but nonetheless, a ‘category error’ has occurred. Does
not compute.
True, Gordon Brown wrote a biography of James
Maxton back in the 80s, but it seems Brown was a different
man then. On the Tory benches, Michael Gove
makes an effort to engage with the cultural sphere, but
this is a very limited exception to the greater picture.
Ideas don’t matter. But they should, something that
Foot never forgot. This book is a window to an age of
wider political possibility, and of greater political imagination.
It is also simply an immensely strong body
of writing on its own terms. And finally it is the truest
tribute possible to the man himself, a giant among
pygmies. �
225
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