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“... The Doctors Morgan had the happy idea of converting Jane Morgan’s doctoral thesis on the career of Christopher Addison into a book and the result is this important and sympathetic biography. As they point out in their preface, he has hitherto had no worthwhile study; R. J. Minney’s biography is, they rightly note, ‘very unsatisfactory’ and drawn from a narrow range of sources ...”

“... and, as if in sympathy, historians have moved to reassess the forgotten regimes. Now Kenneth Morgan has written a first-class study of the Lloyd Georgian experiment of 1918-1922. For some time a muffled debate has been in progress about how political history should be interpreted; from the top downwards, or from the grass roots up? Dr ...”

“... summer, Labour will plunge once more into debating its own history. Not reluctantly, because as Kenneth Morgan points out, the Party ‘has been captivated, even obsessed, by its history’; even more than the Conservatives it is, he says, ‘a prisoner of its past’. Yet the debate will probably be more painful than in the recent past, because it ...”

“... these sectarian times can still convey a true appreciation of Labour’s finest hour, it is surely Kenneth Morgan. He writes for the wide spectrum of readers who still talk the language of common-sense democratic debate. Of course this is rather a deceptive language. It is actually the old Whig ideology, broad and flexible, on which the British have got ...”

“... What baffles one is the persistence of the party in a cause that was politically so calamitous.’ These perceptive words by Lord Blake, the foremost historian of the Conservative Party, aptly sum up the handling of the issues of protective tariffs and imperial preference by the Conservative or Unionist Party between 1903 and 1914. These Edwardian years were dominated by the Liberals, and especially by Lloyd George’s populistic brand of democratic radicalism and social reform ...”

“... It’s just that he isn’t a real person. He isn’t a human being at all.’ This verdict on Rex Mottram in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited conveys something of the despairing bafflement of contemporaries towards the real-life right-wing politician on whom Mottram was modelled – Brendan Bracken. Even in the political fluidity of the Thirties and the Second World War, Bracken, with his self-created and well-advertised mystique as a man of mystery, taxed to the limit the Tories’ appetite for self-made adventurers, already fully tested in the past by such as Disraeli and ‘F ...”

“... Kenneth Morgan’s history of our times is both rewarding and frustrating. It is rewarding on government and politics since 1945, and frustrating on social and economic structure. Between the two, at the point where government and society meet, Dr Morgan is at his most interesting and controversial ...”

“... convicts after they had been sentenced. Indeed, this book and a series of excellent articles by Kenneth Morgan should become mandatory reading for those who imagine that privatisation might represent an improvement over a state-run penal system. The British government negotiated contracts with merchants who specialised in the convict trade. It was a ...”

“... bus who’d actually voted for him ten years earlier, and I’d done it with some exasperation. Kenneth Morgan’s over-long biography brings back all these feelings. Part of the problem is Morgan himself. He has written a long list of books about Wales, the Labour Party, Lloyd George, Wales, Jim ...”

“... industrial and urban population, and much of the rural population, too, in particular areas. Dr Morgan sums up the effect of the growth of this section: ‘Every major Welsh political movement in the last hundred years, from Cymru Fydd in the 1890s down to Plaid Cymru in the 1970s, found difficulty in reconciling its industrial and rural ...”

“... I move on to a story of peaceful though remarkable government – to Labour in Power 1945-1951 by Kenneth O. Morgan. This is a remarkable achievement of political history. The first Attlee government changed the entire character of British politics and administration, or so it seemed at the time – here was a government ...”

“... commendable in the light of recent misadventures than it did to idealistic critics at the time. Kenneth Morgan describes Wilson’s career after 1969 as a ‘slow diminuendo’, but it is arguably in this period that his most enduring political legacy was established. First, after the failed bid for EEC entry and Labour’s return to opposition in ...”

“... who proved Thomsen’s three-age system (stone, bronze, iron) by excavation in the field; Lewis Morgan, whose classification of human development into seven ‘ethnic periods’ from ‘lower savagery’ (up to the discovery of fire) to ‘civilisation’ (from the alphabet onwards) strongly influenced Engels; and, at the other extreme, Giovanni Battista ...”

“... Modernist writer, it is better to move from Bold’s workmanlike expositions of the poetry to Kenneth Buthlay’s splendid new edition of A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle. Fully glossed, annotated, and with a forceful introduction, this edition will be of great value to both old and new readers of the poem. It supplies much linguistic, literary and ...”

“... 1986, Enron was involved in joint drilling with Bush’s company, Spectrum 7. Enron’s chairman, Kenneth Lay, seems to have developed a joshing intimacy with Bush. Loren Fox reproduces Bush’s 1997 birthday letter to Lay: ‘55 years old. Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful wife.’ Political links outside the US were ...”