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Author: Philip Ziegler
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 85
ISBN-13: 0007247400
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe masterly official biography of Britain's former prime minister, which captures all the political drama of the 1970s, so relevant for the present day.
Author: Edward Heath
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2011-09-28
Total Pages: 1118
ISBN-13: 1448204666
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Course of My Life is not only the autobiography of one of the most distinguished figures of modern times, but a revealing panoply of twentieth-century political, international and social history. Born in 1916, Edward Heath became a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1950, following a glittering Oxford and military career, and was at the heart of political life for a long time - as Chief Whip (notably during the Suez Crisis), Minister of Labour, Lord Privy Seal at the Foreign Office, Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965-75, and Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974. Since relinquishing the leadership in 1975, he has maintained a central role in world affairs, as well as pursuing his wide musical and sailing interests. Edward Heath writes his autobiography with complete (and often very amusing) candour, offering us valuable and entertaining insights into the events of the past sixty years. He describes the importance of a united Europe, one of the driving influences in his life since he observed a Nuremberg Rally as an undergraduate, and his continuing thoughts on the subject after he took us into the European Community in the 1970s. He discusses the changes in the Conservative Party in his period as an MP and his modernisation of it as its leader, and the major issues of domestic policy, not least the economy, the trade unions and the Troubles in Northern Ireland; these are set against his range of activities on the international stage, including his negotiations with China and Saddam Hussein, shortly before the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991. Both as a record of a momentous and unequalled career and as an important and frank document of personalities and events, The Course of My Life is as entertaining as it is revealing.
Author: John Campbell
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-08-31
Total Pages: 914
ISBN-13: 140903996X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe son of a carpenter, Edward Heath broke the patrician mould of Tory leaders. He pioneered free enterprise Conservatism ahead of Thatcher. He committed Britain to Europe. With accomplishments outside politics - in music and international sailing - he is the most multi-talented Prime Minister this century. Yet his period in office, which began with such high hopes in June 1970, collapsed in chaos and humiliation after only three-and-a-half years. In this powerful, bestselling biography, John Campbell shows us a nation undergoing a social and psychological revolution and, at its centre, a man of vision and integrity whose legacy will shape British history for decades to come.
Author: Anthony Sampson
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2012-01-11
Total Pages: 1037
ISBN-13: 0307814025
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNelson Mandela, who emerged from twenty-six years of political imprisonment to lead South Africa out of apartheid and into democracy, is perhaps the world's most admired leader, a man whose life has been led with exemplary courage and inspired conviction. Now Anthony Sampson, who has known Mandela since 1951 and has been a close observer of South Africa's political life for the last fifty years, has produced the first authorized biography, the most informed and comprehensive portrait to date of a man whose dazzling image has been difficult to penetrate. With unprecedented access to Mandela's private papers (including his prison memoir, long thought to have been lost), meticulous research, and hundreds of interviews--from Mandela himself to prison warders on Robben Island, from Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo to Winnie Mandela and F. W. de Klerk, and many others intimately connected to Mandela's story--Sampson has composed an enlightening and necessary story of the man behind the myth.
Author: William Waldegrave
Publisher: Constable
Published: 2015-03-05
Total Pages: 340
ISBN-13: 1472119762
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'Why did you go into politics in the first place?' A question that former Cabinet minister has found himself asked, and indeed asking himself, over the years, Lord Waldegrave's is a life lived through politics. The youngest of seven children, and the son of an earl, Waldegrave's quintessentially English upbringing would go on to shape the course of his life, instilling in him a sense of independence and self-discipline needed to steel one for a successful career in government. Formative years spent at Eton, Oxford and Harvard fortified his resolve to enter the political establishment, and by the early seventies he finally achieved his greatest ambition. As an fearless young Conservative politician in the seventies and eighties, one who witnessed the fall of Heath and the triumph and eventual decline of Thatcher, Waldegrave was firmly at the heart of one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods of modern British history. However just as his star was in the ascent, Waldegrave became embroiled in a scandal which tarnished his reputation, but could not dampen his voracious enthusiasm for the political game. An unembroidered account of the narcotic effect of politics from one of the most fiercely intellectual governmental figures of the modern age, A Different Kind of Weather is a beautifully weighted memoir of political success and failure, and the passing of an era. A Spectator Book of the Year - 'refreshingly and engagingly candid' (Jane Ridley)
Author: Barbara Hosking
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2017-11-21
Total Pages: 270
ISBN-13: 178590356X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the tragic massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, to signing the Treaty of Rome when Britain entered the Common Market, Barbara Hosking was there. This is the story of a Cornish scholarship girl with no contacts who ended up in the corridors of power. It is also the very personal story of her struggle with her sexuality as a bewildered teenager, and as a young woman in the 1950s, a time when being gay could mean social ostracism. Born during the General Strike in 1926, Barbara Hosking worked her way through London's typing pools in the 1950s to executive posts in the Labour Party, then to No. 10 as a press officer to Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Between working on a copper mine in the African bush, pioneering British breakfast television and negotiating the complexities of government, hers has been a life of breadth and bravery. Looking back at the age of ninety-one, this is Barbara Hosking's unheard-of account of the innermost workings of politics and the media amid the turbulence of twentieth-century Britain.
Author: Michael McManus
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781783962648
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSir Edward Heath KG MBE MP (1916-2005) was one of the most influential and controversial British politicians--and one of the most elusive and enigmatic personalities--of the post-war era. He was the first leader of the Conservative Party to be formally elected by the party's MPs, rather than "emerging;" and the party's first ever leader from a working-class background. His time as prime minister (1970-74) was marked by industrial unrest, an upsurge in violence in Northern Ireland, and severe economic turbulence, exacerbated by a world oil crisis. He was responsible for taking the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community (now the European Union). And after Margaret Thatcher deposed him as Conservative leader in 1975, his bitter public feud with her lasted for a quarter of a century. There have been several biographies of Heath, plus his own award-winning memoirs, The Course of My Life, but none has fully revealed the essence of the man. This book from Heath's one-time political secretary, Michael McManus, will draw together a remarkable collection of first-hand accounts of Sir Edward's personal and political lives, from those who worked most closely with him and knew him best.
Author: Graham Greene
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2018-08-07
Total Pages: 93
ISBN-13: 1504054318
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe British author shares the “strange . . . inner layers of his playful, guilty imagination” in this glimpse into a brilliant novelist’s subconscious (The New York Times). Culled from nearly eight hundred pages of the author’s “dream diaries” kept between 1965 and 1989, this singular journal reveals “the feverish inner life of an intensely private man, providing an uncanny mirror-image of [his] novelistic obsessions, insecurities, and moral preoccupations” (Publishers Weekly). In what Greene calls My Own World—as opposed to the Common World of shared reality—he accompanies Henry James on a disagreeable riverboat trip to Bogota, is caught in a guerilla crossfire with Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden, strolls in the Vatican garden with Pope John Paul II who’s doling out Perugina chocolates like hosts, offers refuge to a suicidal Charlie Chaplin, and stages a disastrous play in blank verse for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He also shares his headspace with Goebbels, Castro, Cocteau, Queen Elizabeth, D. H. Lawrence, and talking kittens. And the landscape is just as wide: from Nazi Germany to Haiti to West Africa to Bethlehem 1 AD and to Sweden where he seeks treatment for leprosy. Greene is a criminal, spy, lover, assassin, witness, and writer. Encompassing life, death, war, feuds, and career, and alternately absurdist, frightening, funny, and revealing, these fertile imaginings—many of which found their way into Greene’s fiction—comprise nothing less than “an alternate autobiography . . . a uniquely candid self-portrait” of one of the giants of English literature (Kirkus Reviews).
Author: Douglas Hurd
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 2013-03-28
Total Pages: 406
ISBN-13: 0297858513
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNoisy popular liberal interventionism? Or a more conservative, diplomatic approach concentrating on co-operation between nations? This is the debate that lies at the heart of modern politics and Hurd traces its most interesting and influential exponents. He starts with Canning and Castelreagh in post Waterloo Britain; to a generation later, the victory of the interventionist Palmerston over Aberdeen; then to Salisbury (Imperialism) and Grey (European balance of power); and finally to Eden and Bevin who combined to lay the foundations of a post-war compromise. That delicate balance has served its purpose for over half a century, but as we enter a new era of terrorism and racial conflict, the old questions and divisions are re-surfacing . . .
Author: Hugo Young
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2013-06-13
Total Pages: 906
ISBN-13: 1447251962
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this acclaimed political biography, Hugo Young traces Thatcher’s journey from her apprenticeship under Harold Macmillan and her participation in the government of Edward Heath, to her unquestioning destruction of the Conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s and her emergence as a senior stateswoman of the Western world. Drawing on his first-hand experience of covering British politics during the 1970s and 80s, Young presents unique insight into Margaret Thatcher’s final term and the astonishing story of her fall. Richly detailed, intimate and with a full assessment of her historical importance, this is the ultimate portrait of Britain’s first female Prime Minister and her influence on British politics.‘Hugo Young’s wonderfully deadpan biography scrutinises our domestic version of a banana-republic supremo. To be read through twice – and carefully kept for reference’ Norman Lewis, Daily Telegraph ‘Young tells the Thatcher story with fairness and natural elegance, and constructs a rich and subtle portrait’ Peter Jenkins ‘The best book on Mrs Thatcher and the modern Conservative period’ Malcolm Rutherford, Financial Times ‘A remarkable portrait of the most partisan, embattled prime minister of modern times’ Sunday Times ‘a magnificently authoritative work, a textbook to its epoch . . . In its explanatory power, this book is outstanding: a tour de force of political commentary’ Spectator
