Roy Jenkins

The authorised biography of the best Prime Minister Britain never had

Magnificent...  A compelling account of a remarkable life

Campbell is simply a master of the art... This book is effortlessly superior.

Marvellous... The highest praise I can give to John Campbell's biography is that Roy Jenkins would have been proud to have been its author.

A riveting and vital contribution to an understanding of postwar British politics.

A wonderful, readable book. Jenkins himself would have been proud to have produced a masterpiece of this calibre.

Captivating... I read every single one of the 749 pages of this long book with relish and fascination. It is a splendid tribute to one of the greatest British politicians and writers (not necessarily in that order) of the last century.

Magnificent… As plump and benign as its subject.

Campbell is an excellent biographer. He has a strong narrative grasp and knows how to use evidence. His books are not showy, but if you test their propositions, you almost always find them fair.

Wonderful... It is the well-rounded life of its subject that makes this book such an entertaining, as well as an instructive, read.

One of the best political biographies you could hope to read.

A page-turner of a biography, written with subtlety, clarity and considerable skill.

The fact that, at the end of this long and thoughtful book, one ends up admiring and liking Jenkins more rather than less is a tribute to Campbell's skills as a biographer but even more to Jenkins's own personality and achievements.

Thoroughly researched… Commendably honest.

This biography is as substantial as its subject.

A revealing, informative and entertaining biography of one of the 20th century’s most convivial and intelligent bon viveurs.

One of the very best political biographies this year… A biography of admiration, but not hagiography.

Jenkins himself would have been proud to have written such a masterful biography.

[Campbell’s] Roy Jenkins…is a towering achievement.

[Campbell] provides a masterly picture of a complex man.

The year’s best conventional biography.

Campbell catches his subject as Jenkins caught Churchill.

This book is a triumph and a must for anyone who wants to understand the turbulent politics of late 20th-century.

This is a political biography that doesn’t just appeal to political anoraks.

A wonderfully entertaining depiction of another political era.

A fascinating, brilliantly researched biography of a major politician.

Campbell’s masterly biography is a triumph: beautifully written and never less than fascinating

a rich and well-crafted account of Jenkin’s life and career

magnificent… [Campbell] brings his subject to life in a way few would have thought possible.

John Campbell is the author of many biographies including one of Edward Heath, for which he won the 1994 NCR award, The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, from Grocer's Daughter to Iron Lady and, most recently, Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown. He is married and lives in Kent.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize 
 
Shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Biography Award 
 
Longlisted for the 2015 Orwell Prize 
 
Winner of the 2014 Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year 
 
Roy Jenkins was probably the best Prime Minister Britain never had. But though he never reached 10 Downing Street, he left a more enduring mark on British society than most of those who did. 
 
As a radical Home Secretary in the 1960s he drove through the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the legalisation of abortion. An early and consistent advocate of European unity, he played a decisive role in achieving British membership first of the Common Market and then of the European Union. Then in 1981, when both the Conservative and Labour parties had moved sharply to the right and left respectively he founded the centrist Social Democratic Party (SDP) which ultimately paved the way for Tony Blair’s creation of New Labour. On top of all this, Jenkins was a compulsive writer whose twenty-three books included best-selling biographies of Asquith, Gladstone and Churchill. He was the embodiment of the liberal establishment with a genius for friendship who knew and cultivated everyone who mattered in the overlapping worlds of politics, literature, diplomacy and academia. His biography is the story of an exceptionally well-filled and well-rounded life.

A Biography

Edward Heath

It holds the reader from the first page to the last. That - plus the beating of a long-needed historical path through the thickets of the early 1970s - makes it a truly special contribution to contemporary history.

I do not believe a better biography of Ted Heath will ever be written... We feel we know him.

An outstanding book - over 800 pages and not a word wasted.

John Campbell's massive and highly impressive biography takes us a long way towards understanding this ambiguous but powerful figure [who has] shaped our affairs fundamentally over the past 30 years.

The best biography of its subject ever likely to be written.

John Campbell was born in 1947 and educated at Edinburgh University. His books include Lloyd George: The Goat in the Wilderness, F.E. Smith, Roy Jenkins, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism, If Love Were All...: The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George, Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown and The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher: From Grocer's Daughter to Iron Lady. He has also edited a number of books including The Experience of World War II and the series ‘Makers of the Twentieth Century’.

The 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.

Margaret Thatcher: From Grocer’s Daughter to Iron Lady

The Iron Lady

Read the true story that inspired the major new film, The Iron Lady. John Campbell's magisterial biography is the political biography of Margaret Thatcher.

Anyone who really wants to know what happened between 1979 and 1990 should read this book

The best book yet written about Lady Thatcher

Superbly researched...unlike so many others is neither hagiography nor hatchet-job, and probably gets closer to the truth than any...magnificently told

An enormously useful achievement...every twist and turn of her political life is here

[A] thorough biography... brought together in a useful abridged paperback version... Campbell is a leading political biographer... Campbell's vivid account is easy to read

The best post-power biography is John Campbell's intensely detailed two-volume Margaret Thatcher. Anyone who wants to know what she did should turn to it

Campbell's style is cool, detached, offering sympathy, praise, criticism, and blame in equal measure... It's an enlightened and enlightening portrayal of Thatcher and other key political figures of the 1980s

John Campbell's biography... is the most fair-minded and scrupulous study of Lady Thatcher yet

A fascinating peek behind the handbag'

How Britain’s first woman prime minister achieved her  full political ascendency is a story brilliantly told in John  Campbell’s biography

John Campbell is recognised as one of Britain's leading political biographers. In addition to Edward Heath, which won the NCR Award in 1994, his subjects have included Lloyd George (1977), F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead (1983), Roy Jenkins (1983) and Aneurin Bevan (1986). His most recent books are If Love Were All: The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George, and Pistols at Dawn, published by Jonathan Cape in June 2009. He is currently writing the authorised biography of Roy Jenkins.

'An enormously useful achievement...every twist and turn of her political life is here' The Times, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
In this abridged edition of John Campbell's two acclaimed volumes on Margaret Thatcher, we trace the life of Britain's only female Prime Minister, from her upbringing in Grantham to her unexpected challenge for leadership of the Conservative party to her eleven tumultuous years in Downing Street and her eventual removal from power. 
 
This is an extraordinary account of an extraordinary individual who changed the face of Britain; John Campbell portrays an ambitious and determined woman who started cautiously, grew in confidence after the Falklands War but became increasingly remote and domineering until she finally lost the trust of her colleagues.

Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown

Pistols at Dawn

A brilliant book about political rivalries through the ages, from the prize-winning biographer and historian.

One of Britain's finest political biographers... a rattling good read

While pistols have long since gone out of fashion, the tradition of the political duel, as John Campbell's delightful book suggests, is far from dead...a wonderfully, irresistibly compelling read

These eight studies are lively, penetrating, intelligent and, like all Campbell's work, exceptionally well written

A joy to read: meticulously researched, beautifully written and scrupulously fair

Stylish look at two centuries of quarrels and catfights

Entertaining... An elegantly written, wise and authoritative volume

This is a timely book. It comes at a moment when British politics is haunted by the intimate enmity of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and by all its attendant sub-feuds

This is a most engaging and rewarding book...stylish, scholarly and notably perceptive

He [Campbell] captures the determining role of personality in politics and the book is strong on tactics, strategy and, most of all, skulduggery

a wonderfully, irresistibly compelling read

...cleverly conceived and stylishly executed...

...well worth staying the course... Campbell's dissection of this last union covers much familiar ground, but he shows just how much a close political relationship can hobble an administration as much as energise it

The book is a joy to read: meticulously researched, beautifully written and scrupulously fair.

John Campbell is recognised as one of Britain's leading political biographers. In addition to Edward Heath, which won the NCR Award in 1994, and his highly praised two-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher (2000 and 2003), his subjects have included Lloyd George (1977), F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead (1983), Roy Jenkins (1983) and Aneurin Bevan (1986). His most recent book, If Love Were All: The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George, was published in 2006. He is currently writing the authorised biography of Roy Jenkins.

Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Personal rivalry is the very stuff of politics. The causes and controversies, the parties and technology may have changed over time but political conflict is still dramatised by the competition of ambitious individuals for the highest offices. Over the past two hundred years the size of the electorate has grown enormously and the means of reaching it transformed out of all recognition but human nature itself hasn't changed. 
 
In his thought-provoking book John Campbell considers eight pairs of rivals and shows how their antagonism, which often evolved into outright loathing, has determined the course of political conflict. In each of his cases studies - Fox and Pitt, Castlereagh and Canning, Gladstone and Disraeli, Asquith and Lloyd George, Bevan and Gaitskell, Macmillan and Butler, Heath and Thatcher, Brown and Blair - he combines a vivid narrative with an authoritative assessment of the historical legacy that reveals how ideology is inextricably entwined with personality.

Volume One: The Grocer’s Daughter

Margaret Thatcher

The first volume of the critically acclaimed, definitive biography of Margaret Thatcher.

A winner. Whatever your views on the grocer's daughter, I defy you not to enjoy it

'A superbly researched biography... unlike so many others is neither hagiography nor hatchet-job, and probably gets closer to the truth than any... magnificently told'

'A fascinating account... Campbell's research is as exhaustive as it is meticulous'

'A fascinating account... Campbell's research is as exhaustive as it is meticulous' Observer 
 
When Margaret Thatcher unexpectedly emerged to challenge Edward Heath for the Conservative Party leadership in 1975, the public knew her only as the archetypal Home Counties Tory Lady, more famous for her hats than for any outstanding talent: she had a rich businessman husband, sent her children to the most expensive private schools and sat in Parliament for Finchley. 
 
Yet almost overnight she reinvented herself. Journalists who set out to discover where she came from were amazed to find that she had grown up above a grocer's shop in Grantham. Within weeks of her becoming Tory leader an entirely new image was in place, based around the now famous corner shop beside the Great North Road; the strict Methodist upbringing; and her father, who taught her the 'Victorian values' which were the foundations of her subsequent career. 
 
In the first volume of the first full-scale biography of Margaret Thatcher since her fall from power - and the first thoroughly to explore her early life - John Campbell re-examines the mythology and suggests a more complex reality behind the idealised picture accepted by Lady Thatcher's early biographers. He portrays an ambitious and determined woman ruthlessly distancing herself from her roots, until the moment in 1975 when they suddenly became a political asset.

Margaret Thatcher Volume Two

The second volume of the epic biography shorlisted for the Orwell Prize and hailed as 'much the best book written about Lady Thatcher' (Daily Telegraph)

John Campbell succeeds brilliantly with this second volume of his biography of Britain's first woman prime minister. His account - compelling, often exhilarating and, in its closing pages, genuinely moving - portrays Thatcher's political career as a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare

Anyone who wants to know what really happened between 1979 and 1990 should read this book

A brilliantly researched, thoroughly sourced version of the most remarkable premiership of our time

'An enormously useful achievement... every twist and turn of her political life is here'

'I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and indeed arguing with it, because it has reminded me why so many of us would never have wanted her to give up'

John Campbell is the author of biographies of Lloyd George (1977), F. E. Smith (1983), Roy Jenkins (1983), Aneurin Bevan (1986) and Edward Heath (1994), for which he won the NCR Award. Margaret Thatcher Volume 2: The Iron Lady was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2004.

The first volume of John Campbell's biography of Margaret Thatcher was described by Frank Johnson in the Daily Telegraph as 'much the best book yet written about Lady Thatcher'. That volume, The Grocer's Daughter, described Mrs Thatcher's childhood and early career up until the 1979 General Election which carried her into Downing Street. 
 
This second volume covers the whole eleven and a half years of her momentous premiership. Thirteen years after her removal from power, this is the first comprehensive and fully researched study of the Thatcher Government from its hesitant beginning to its dramatic end. Campbell draws on the mass of memoirs and diaries of Mrs Thatcher's colleagues, aides, advisers and rivals, as well as on original material from the Ronald Reagan archive, shedding fascinating new light on the Reagan-Thatcher 'special relationship', and on dozens of interviews. 
 
The Iron Lady will confirm John Campbell's Margaret Thatcher as one of the greatest political biographies of recent times.

John Campbell

Fascinating... John Campbell has an extraordinary story to tell and he tells it with great skill and authority... Gripping

Campbell's pacily written book is tantalising.  It is the sheer quantity of material, with hundreds of letters and diary entries comprehensively transcribed, that makes this rather prurient volume possible

Elegant... [Campbell] makes an excellent fist of it, using innumerable letters and diaries to produce an engrossing, judicious read

A book that is by turns compulsively readable and deeply enlightening about the character of one of our greatest Prime Ministers

The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George

In the summer of 1911 David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, hired a young schoolteacher called Frances Stevenson to tutor his daughter in the summer holidays. He was forty-eight, and married with four children. She was twenty-two, highly intelligent as well as very attractive, and Lloyd George soon began to employ her as his secretary. 
 
At the beginning of 1913 they became lovers, on terms spelt out by Lloyd George with ruthless clarity. Their secret relationship was to last for thirty years until his wife's death finally allowed Lloyd George to marry her in 1943. 
 
Combining sex, romance, family feuds and high politics- based on letters, diaries and a vast range of material, published and unpublished - If Love Were All... is the first detailed study of this extraordinary relationship, one that was known about by everyone in politics but never revealed in the press, and the strains that it placed on both parties.

John Campbell

Praise for If Love Were All...

Fascinating... John Campbell has an extraordinary story to tell and he tells it with great skill and authority... Gripping

Campbell's pacily written book is tantalising. It is the sheer quantity of material, with hundreds of letters and diary entries comprehensively transcribed, that makes this rather prurient volume possible

Elegant... [Campbell] makes an excellent fist of it, using innumerable letters and diaries to produce an engrossing, judicious read

Fascinating... John Campbell has an extraordinary story to tell and he tells it with great skill and authority... Gripping

Campbell's pacily written book is tantalising. It is the sheer quantity of material, with hundreds of letters and diary entries comprehensively transcribed, that makes this rather prurient volume possible

Elegant... [Campbell] makes an excellent fist of it, using innumerable letters and diaries to produce an engrossing, judicious read

Fascinating... John Campbell has an extraordinary story to tell and he tells it with great skill and authority... Gripping

Campbell's pacily written book is tantalising. It is the sheer quantity of material, with hundreds of letters and diary entries comprehensively transcribed, that makes this rather prurient volume possible

Elegant... [Campbell] makes an excellent fist of it, using innumerable letters and diaries to produce an engrossing, judicious read

Books by John Campbell

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