Kenneth O. Morgan has been one of Britain's leading modern historians for over 30 years.

He was Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, 1966 - 89, and Vice-Chancellor in the University of Wales, 1989 - 95. He is a regular reviewer and broadcaster on radio and television. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1983, Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College in 1992 and became a life peer (Labour) in 2000.

His 25 books include WALES IN BRITISH POLITICS (1963, new edition 1992); THE AGE OF LLOYD GEORGE (1971); (ed.) LLOYD GEORGE FAMILY LETTERS (1973); LLOYD GEORGE (1974); KEIR HARDIE, RADICAL AND SOCIALIST (1975, Arts Council book prize); CONSENSUS AND DISUNITY (1079); REBIRTH OF A NATION: WALES 1880 - 1980, Arts Council book prize 1981); LABOUR IN POWER 1945 - 1951 (1984); (ed.) THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF BRITAIN (1984), which has sold over 600,000 copies; LABOUR PEOPLE (1987); THE PEOPLE'S PEACE:BRITAIN SINCE 1945 (1990, new edition 2001); MODERN WALES: POLITICS, PLACES AND PEOPLE (1995); CALLAGHAN: A LIFE (1997, new edition 1999); THE TWENTIETH CENTURY(2001).

He is currently writing a book on the public memory in 20th Century Britain.

He was married to the late Dr Jane Morgan, the criminologist, and has a son and a daughter. He lives in West Oxfordshire.

This is the authorised (but not uncritical) life of one of the great parliamentarians and orators of our times, the former Labour Party leader, now in his nineties, who is also an eminent man of letters.

Michael Foot has been a controversial and charismatic figure in British public life, political and literary, for over sixty years. Emerging from a famous west-country Liberal dynasty, he rose as a crusading left-wing journalist in the late 1930s. He has been the voice of libertarian socialism in parliament, an international socialist and government minister, and was Labour leader for two-and-a-half -years between 1980 and 1983. His political friendships with people like Beaverbrook, Cripps, Aneurin Bevan and Barbara Castle were passionate and profound, but he also had a remarkable and quite different career as a man of letters, with Dean Swift, Tom Paine, Hazlitt, Byron, Wordsworth, Heine, Wells and Silone amongst his heroes. His two-volume life of Bevan is a triumph of political biography.

Kenneth Morgan's biography does full justice to both the public and the private side of Michael Foot -- no more tellingly than his descriptions of Foot's long and happy marriage to the filmmaker, feminist and writer Jill Craigie.