The Thatcher/Major years, as far as Michael was concerned, had wrecked the world that the 1945 Labour landslide had inaugurated. Shortly after the incident with Major, Michael traveled to Manchester f...
That was how I met Mrs. Thatcher, Michael said. It must have been 1976, just before she was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Michael had just given a speech: I went up to look at it, and ther...
Michael was astonished to see Reagan reading his speech off of the teleprompter. I’d never seen it before. Everybody does it now. But it’s an outrageous thing. It absolutely destroys the idea that the...
It was the time Tony Benn and Denis Healey were competing for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party. I was pretty leftwing, so was Jill Tweedie and there was this huge feeling that Tony Benn was t...
If Sam Goldwyn read the reviews of Dakota, he might have taken some satisfaction in Walter Brennan’s critical drubbing. Walter had decided not to renew his contract with the producer. The actor, mimic...
Brennan almost never accepted the clothes that studios designed for his parts. He called himself a dirty actor, by which he meant that the grungy duds he wore on-screen were his own. Brennan had to sm...
As much as most kids growing up I liked digging for buried treasure, and when there was no buried treasure to be found, I buried some myself for later discovery. I think of my subjects the same way: t...
A Private Life of Michael Foot is an effort to show how a biographer struggles to tell his own story, even as family and friends cherish differing narratives about that same subject.