WIN $150 GIFT VOUCHERS: ALADDIN'S GOLD
Professor Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter. His books include Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (Macmillan 2007), Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2013), and (with David Thackeray) Age of Promises: Electoral Pledges in Twentieth Century Britain (OUP 2021). He has made numerous TV and radio appearances and has written for a wide range of publications, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement.
The clue to our future lies in our past and Toye has winkled it out with elegant and devastating precision. Anyone who wants to find the nuggets of hope in today's Britain as we approach a watershed election needs to read this book and see what pragmatic idealism achieved between 1945 and 1951. -- Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda This is a stunningly original revision of the Attlee government and its impact on British society. It's the best book I've read this year. -- Frank Field, former MP for Birkenhead A hundred years since the first Labour Government, Richard Toye’s readable and persuasive study argues that while arguments over the party’s past have often shaped its future, Labour does best when it forgets old battles and finds a way to combine hope with pragmatism. The history of the era is highly contested, but the book does a masterly job of picking through the bitterness to understand what has worked in the past and has a reasonable chance of working in the future. -- Anne Perkins, author of 'A Very British Strike' and 'Red Queen: The Authorized Biography of Barbara Castle' This book illustrates how the key players in the Attlee Government combined their radical idealism and pragmatism to seize their moment and create such a sense of purpose and hope that was truly transformative and set the standard for all subsequent Labour administrations to live up to. -- John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington
