Author:Tony Benn
The Benn Diaries, embracing the years 1940-1990, are already established as a uniquely authoritative, fascinating and readable record of political life. The selected highlights that form this single-volume edition include the most notable events, arguments and personal reflections throughout Benn's long and remarkable career as a leading politician.
The narrative starts with Benn as a schoolboy and takes the reader through his youthful wartime experiences as a trainee pilot, his nervous excitement as a new MP during Clement Atlee's premiership and the tribulations of Labour in the 1950s, when the Conservatives were in firm control. It ends with the Tories again in power, but on the eve of Margaret Thatcher's fall, while Tony Benn is on a mission to Baghdad before the impending Gulf War.
Over the span of fifty years, the public and private turmoil in British and world politics is recorded as Benn himself moves from wartime service to become the baby of the House, Cabinet Minister, and finally the Commons' most senior Labour Member.
The Benn Diaries, intensely personal, candid and engaging as they are, rank as an important work of historiography
—— Alan Clark , Daily TelegraphQuite apart from the brio of illuminating a life almost entirely free of boredom (another rarity), the collected Benn has some critical patches of postwar history recorded hot
—— Peter Hennessy , The TimesImmensely readable and revealing
—— Ben Pimlott , Sunday TimesAn archive of incalculable value
—— Ruth Dudley Edwards , IndependentThe best political diarist of our time
—— Financial Times'Man is an excellent guide...well-versed in Mongolian, he has travelled extensively in the country while researching the more mysterious elements Genghis' life, and this experience shines through the book...he writes knowledgeably'
—— Literary ReviewA top biography...This is great, grisly stuff and an education for anyone
—— Evening Standard... This bright, engaging and breezy book ... suits the tenor of our times.
—— The TimesA remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event
—— New York Times Book ReviewThe Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in 'drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust'
—— New York TimesA quiet triumph, moving and simple - impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics
—— Washington PostAll too infrequently, a book comes along that' s as daring as it is acclaimed. Art Spiegelman's Maus is just such a book
—— EsquireA remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution... at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant
—— Jules FeifferMaus is a masterpiece, and it's in the nature of such things to generate mysteries, and pose more questions than they answer. But if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect
—— Philip PullmanSpiegelman's Maus changed comics forever. Comics now can be about anything
—— Alison BechdelReading [his work] has been an amazing lesson in storytelling
—— Etgar KeretIt can be easy to forget how much of a game-changer Maus was.
—— Washington Post