The Left’s Megaphone
Eric Hobsbawm
- Harold Laski: A Political Biography by Michael Newman
Macmillan, 438 pp, £45.00, March 1993, ISBN 0 333 43716 0 - Harold Laski: A Life on the Left by Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman
Hamish Hamilton, 669 pp, £25.00, June 1993, ISBN 0 241 12942 7
‘It would not be too much to say,’ wrote the otherwise unsympathetic Max (now Lord) Beloff after Harold Laski’s death in 1950, ‘that ... the future historian may talk of the period between 1920 and 1950 as the “The Age of Laski.”’ Thirty-seven years later a leading historian of the Labour Party observed that ‘Laski’s time and reputation have gone into almost total eclipse.’ How did a thinker, writer and political figure of such prominence come to disappear from sight so completely? It is a problem of both biography and intellectual history, for Laski’s impact is inseparable from his personality and style of public appearance. Curiously, after forty years in the shadows he now emerges, almost simultaneously, in two new biographies totalling eleven hundred pages, a fact which would have undoubtedly pleased their subject.
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