NATURAL SOUNDS RELAXATION CD - EVENING CRICKETS
 | £3.50 End Date: Tuesday Feb-07-2012 15:48:18 GMT Buy It Now for only: £3.50 Buy it now | Add to watch list |
OGDENS - PROMINENT CRICKETERS OF 1938 #17 - YORKSHIRE - MAURICE LEYLAND
 | £1.99 End Date: Tuesday Feb-07-2012 15:50:14 GMT Buy It Now for only: £1.99 Buy it now | Add to watch list |
ENGLISH WILLOW CRICKET BAT -MSR 2lb 10oz- BAT 117!
 | £75.00 End Date: Tuesday Feb-07-2012 15:51:54 GMT Buy It Now for only: £75.00 Buy it now | Add to watch list |
ECB Official Cricket Twenty20 It's Cricket T-Shirt
 | £4.95 End Date: Tuesday Feb-07-2012 15:52:10 GMT Buy It Now for only: £4.95 Buy it now | Add to watch list |
John Major The Autobiography
 BUY HERE! |
RRP: £25.00
Our Price: £41.22 (subject to change)
Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review
John Major's rise to the post of British prime minister is a puzzle of modern politics that his lengthy autobiography fails to resolve. It is clear, as we follow him from his modest origins in south London to his work as a local councillor and his remarkable ascent at Westminster under the eye of Margaret Thatcher, that he was driven by a determination to prove himself. But now that we are growing used to the messianic zeal that Tony Blair brings to the role of prime minister, it seems extraordinary that John Major should have achieved the position with such little evident vision or relish. Here is the man we thought we knew, decent, hard-working; at the mercy of events rather than their master.
So we find him bowed down by the misfortunes of an ungrateful world, rendered defensive by problems with the economy, by arguments over Europe, by the intractability of politicians in Northern Ireland, by attacks from within his own party.
With that same party busy airbrushing him from its history--despite his unlikely victory over Neil Kinnock in 1992--it's as well he has got his account into print, an unstuffy telling of a fascinating story that is free of the pomposity that affects so many of his political peers and which reveals a deep-seated belief in the value of basic decency. "I will not concede possession of the recent past to the mythographers of left or right who have every self-interest in retouching the history we made," he says.
But how sad to find him still so defensive and so bitter about the slights of others, still anxious to explain why speeches or gestures were misconstrued. "I was too conservative, too conventional. Too safe, too often. Too defensive. Too reactive," he says. But could he have been anything else? --Kim Fletcher
Product Details/Specifications
Authors:
John Major
Recording label: HarperCollins
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
EAN: 9780002570046
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 0002570041
Number of pages: 800
Publication date: 1999-10-11
Language: English (Unknown)
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: English (Published)
Similar Products
- The Downing Street Years
- The Blair Years
- Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography
- The Path to Power
- The Course of My Life: The Autobiography of Edward Heath