Ernest Bevin

Book of the year, The Spectator
Political book of the year, The Times

As a statesman, Ernest Bevin is second only to Churchill in impact and legacy. Born in abject poverty to a single mother, and with virtually no formal education, Bevin went on to become the founder of the largest trade union in British history and then made it to the top of politics and government.

As Minister of Labour and National Service from 1940 to 1945, he was the nation's wartime mobiliser-in-chief. Clement Attlee, Churchill's Deputy Prime Minister, kept the wartime coalition in good administrative order, but it was the charismatic Bevin who really drove the domestic war effort.

As post-war Foreign Secretary, Bevin was Britain's last world power envoy and did much to thwart Stalin's Soviet Union and to prevent Europe sinking back into conflict. No one did more to stabilise and democratise Europe and to pave the way for the European Union.

In this major, wide-ranging new biography, Andrew Adonis brings to life one of our greatest statesmen a politician whose light is often unjustly hidden beneath that of his more celebrated contemporaries.