Michael Foot Book order (chronological)

Disappointment can be salutary. In the 1955 election Michael Foot surprisingly lost his seat. Until then he had been a journalist, albeit a prolific and influential one. He now had more time on his hands. To both his father, Isaac Foot, and himself Jonathan Swift was a hero. His father, who believed writing to be the supreme vocation, now encouraged him to write a book on Swift. The result was The Pen and the Sword. Michael Foot concentrates on the crucial two years of 1710-11. In that time Swift published one of his most devastating polemics The Conduct of the Allies that tore into the Whig government and the Duke of Marlborough in particular. It is an important moment in English History: the pen and the sword fought a duel, and the pen proved the stronger of the two.First published in 1957 it was well and widely reviewed. 'Enthralling ... a fine piece of historical writing.' Spectator 'An exciting story excellently narrated ... a lucid guide to one of the most complicated patterns of intrigue and manoeuvre that the eighteenth-century can provide ... intensely dramatic.' Harold Nicolson, Observer

When Aneurin Bevan died in 1960 he was acclaimed as an outstanding political figure, a parliamentary debater of the first order and a man of courage and personal magnetism. Yet he spent his life at the centre of a ferocious political controversy. This biography unravels the details of his life.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.' Shipwrecked on the high seas, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself washed up on the strange island of Lilliput, a land inhabited by quarrelsome miniature people. On his travels he continues to meet others who force him to reflect on human behaviour - the giants of Brobdingnag, the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. In this scathing satire on the politics and morals of the 18th Century, Swift's condemnation of society and its institutions still resonates today.