The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps 1889-1952 - Softcover

Clarke, Peter

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9780140286915: The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps 1889-1952

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140286918 ISBN 13: 9780140286915

Publisher: Penguin, 2003

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Sir Stafford Cripps was one of the towering - and distinctive - figures in British public life in the 1930s and 1940s. He was responsible more than anyone else for shaping the settlement which led to Indian independence. In 1942, when he was credited with bringing Russia into the war on the Allied side, and again in 1947, he was seen as the man who should take over as Prime Minister if Churchill or Attlee fell. Yet his image is forever associated with "austerity" - a vegetarian, teetotaler, a devout Christian and easy to caricature. This long-awaited biography, by one of Britain's leading 20th century historians, is the first to be written with complete access to his private and public papers, and immediately supercedes everything else.

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Review:

Sir Stafford Cripps has not lacked biographers. There have been some half-dozen, including two within the last five years. But Peter Clarke's The Cripps Version is, as the title implies, the first to be based on full access to Cripps' personal papers. Where other books on Cripps have painted portraits from the outside--from public records and from the papers of other politicians--Clarke is able to see things from inside out, using the voluminous personal and unofficial correspondence left by Cripps, as well as a series of his diaries. Cripps was an unusually off-the-record politician, and Clarke's famous forensic skills of reconstruction, used to such great effect in his earlier books on Edwardian "new liberalism" and on JM Keynes, are brought to bear on this complex man, who was a radical hero of the 1930s, war-time shuttle diplomat in the Soviet Union and India, and post-war Chancellor in the era of rationing and devaluation.

The book concentrates on Cripps in and out of office after 1940. We get through the first 50 years of his life in 80 pages, leaving Clarke plenty of space to unpick with great precision the principal events and controversies of the 1940s: the rivalry with Churchill, the coaxing of Stalin, the placating of Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, and the management of the post-war British economy. This is political biography at its very best. If Cripps emerges as a less colourful character from this definitive work, he is also revealed as a more credible politician, who achieved his ends by a combination of hard work, charm, noblesse oblige, a strong Christian ethic and only a smattering of ideology. --Miles Taylor

Review:

This long-awaited biography, by one of Britain's leading historians, is the first to be written with complete access to Cripps's private and public papers.

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