Piers Vitebsky is an anthropologist and Head of social Science at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, England. He is author of Dialogues with the Dead.
Ian Lang, now Lord Lang of Monkton, played a major part in the now-distant years of Tory triumph that began in 1979. He was at the centre of what many historians already call the Thatcherite Revolution, and witnessed at first hand the removal from power by her own party of one of Britain's most individual of post-war leaders. Ian Lang joined John Major's first Cabinet as Secretary of State for Scotland, and was Major's campaign manager in the 1995 Tory leadership election. Throughout this period he kept a daily diary. This is the basis of a substantial portion of these memoirs, which are written with rather more humour and sparkle than most politicians' accounts of themselves, and there are plenty of insiders' revelations here.