Ramsay MacDonald (20 British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Kevin Morgan Our price £6.99 (£9.99) New from £4.28 Used from £3.20 Pages: 176 (Paperback) ISBN: 1904950612 Pub: Haus Publishing Limited Pub date: 2006-09-15 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 221376

Reader Reviews:

A Useful Introduction in the Absence of Recent Biographies (0/0 people found this helpful)

In the absence of recent biographies on James Ramsay MacDonald this little book provides a useful introduction to the first Labour Prime Minister. The book briefly covers the background of MacDonald and then describes the two Labour governments of 1924 and 1929 to 31. The National Government of MacDonald and Baldwin is discussed together with MacDonald's motivation in taking this bold, and some would say, disastrous step. The author finally provides a resume of the career and achievements, if any, of this curious man. MacDonald is generally ignored or is the subject of odium in the Labour pantheon of statesmen and this book provides a good introduction as to why this should be so. Sometimes a more straightforward narrative style would have been preferable to the circuitous style of Kevin Morgan, for example, a simple description of the key members of the first and second Labour cabinets would have been useful, but this information has to be gathered along the way and then is not complete. The interested reader will, inevitably, be left wanting more detail on some of the issues and this might have been given in preference to the extended career summary. The book contains a useful chronology of MacDonald's premiership. Contains several typographical errors. For a fuller life of MacDonald see David Marquand, Jonathan Cape, 1977.

Confident, commanding and informative. (2/3 people found this helpful)

Kevin Morgan's Biography of Ramsay Macdonald is an insightful introduction into the life and times of Britain's first Labour prime minister who is often purposely forgotten by the Labour party because of his abandonment of it in 1931. Morgan is able to present a good, balanced view of the divisive figure that was Mr Macdonald. Well worth the read to understand why comparing a Labour politician to Macdonald is seen as insulting.

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