Alice Bacon was one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable female politicians. Born and raised in the Yorkshire town of Normanton, she defied the odds to be elected Labour MP for Leeds North East in the 1945 General Election. Famed in her home town for her unlikely love of sports cars, she was a much-respected, no-nonsense, hard-working representative for her beloved Yorkshire home in Westminster. Mentored by Herbert Morrison and Hugh Gaitskell, she rose through the party becoming a Home Office minister under Roy Jenkins and latterly an Education Minister with responsibility for the introduction of comprehensive schools. In the Home Office in the 1960s she oversaw the introduction of substantial societal changes, including the abolition of the death penalty, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the legalisation of abortion. Her political career spanned some of the most momentous decades in Britain's postwar history and she played an integral part in some of the most significant social, educational and political changes which the country has ever witnessed.Labour MP Rachel Reeves here tells Alice Bacon's story, narrating one woman's extraordinary progression from the coalfields to the Commons.

The Westminster Alice is a collection of humorous vignettes by Saki, first published in the Westminster Gazette in 1902, which form a political pastiche of the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, featuring an unforgettable cast of notable politicians of the day, and brought to life with illustrations by F. Carruthers Gould - 'with apologies to Sir John Tenniel' for their striking likeness to the original Alice illustrations. Desperately trying to navigate her way through the world of Ineptitudes, Knights, Queens and Mad Hatters, Alice delivers a stinging satire of Westminster politics - which, imbued with Saki's charm and delicate wit, and set in a world evocative of Carroll's timeless Wonderland, is as charming today as when it was written, and belongs on every Alice fan's bookshelf.

Alice in Wonderland (also known as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), from 1865, is the peculiar and imaginative tale of a girl who falls down a rabbit-hole into a bizarre world of eccentric and unusual creatures. Lewis Carroll's prominent example of the genre of "literary nonsense" has endured in popularity with its clever way of playing with logic and a narrative structure that has influence generations of fiction writing.

Following his acclaimed life of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories, and analyzes how this relationship stirred Carroll’s imagination and influenced the creation of Wonderland. It also explains why Alice in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), took on an unstoppable cultural momentum in the Victorian era and why, a century and a half later, they continue to enthrall and delight readers of all ages. The Story of Alice reveals Carroll as both an innovator and a stodgy traditionalist, entrenched in habits and routines. He had a keen double interest in keeping things moving and keeping them just as they are. (In Looking-Glass Land, Alice must run faster and faster just to stay in one place.) Tracing the development of the Alice books from their inception in 1862 to Liddell’s death in 1934, Douglas-Fairhurst also provides a keyhole through which to observe a larger, shifting cultural landscape: the birth of photography, changing definitions of childhood, murky questions about sex and sexuality, and the relationship between Carroll’s books and other works of Victorian literature. In the stormy transition from the Victorian to the modern era, Douglas-Fairhurst shows, Wonderland became a sheltered world apart, where the line between the actual and the possible was continually blurred.

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From Policy Advocates to Whips to Ministers, the many roles within the British Parliament are shaped not only by institutional rules but also by the individuals who fill them, yet few observers have fully appreciated this vital aspect of governing in one of the world's oldest representative systems. Applying a new motivational role theory to materials from extensive first-hand interviews conducted during the eventful 1970s, Donald Searing deepens our understanding of how Members of Parliament understand their goals, their careers, and their impact on domestic and global issues. He explores how Westminster's world both controls and is created by individuals, illuminating the interplay of institutional constraints and individual choice in shaping roles within the political arena. No other book tells us so much about political life at Westminster. Searing has interviewed 521 Members of Parliament--including Conservative Ministers Margaret Thatcher, Peter Walker, and James Prior; Labour Ministers Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, and Denis Healey; rising stars Michael Heseltine, Norman Tebbitt, David Owen, and Roy Hattersley; habitual outsiders, like Michael Foot, who eventually joined the inner circle; and former insiders, like Enoch Powell, who were shut out. Searing also gives voice to the vast number of Westminster's backbenchers, who play a key part in shaping political roles in Parliament but are less likely to be heard in the media: trade unionists, knights of the shires, owners of small businesses, and others. In this segment of his study, women, senior backbenchers, and newcomers are well represented. Searing adroitly blends quantitative with qualitative analysis and integrates social and economic theories about political behavior. He addresses concerns about power, duty, ambition, and representation, and skillfully joins these concerns with his critical discoveries about the desires, beliefs, and behaviors associated with roles in Parliament. Westminster's World offers political scientists, historians, anthropologists, political commentators, and the public rich new material about the House of Commons as well as a convincing model for understanding the structure and dynamics of political roles.