Word: sevan
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Both men, it is shrewdly noted by Sevan's biographer, British M.P. Michael Foot, were romantics. Churchill's romanticism was invested in the manifest glories of the English past and Sevan's in the evangelical dream of a new Jerusalem in a classless England of the future. But the boy who was born in Blenheim Palace and the boy born in a collier's cottage were well matched when history brought them face to face in the House of Commons. They were the greatest parliamentarians of the century...
...populous political landscape; biography becomes history. Churchill, of course, is all grandeur and the tragedy of nations; Bevan was a class warrior, and his finest hour, like Socialism's, was never to come. But as near as may be-though he has been dead three years-this is Sevan's own brief. It is a sort of ghost-written book, with Foot as ghost, for Biographer Foot was not only a close friend and passionate partisan; he is today what Bevan was-Member of Parliament for the Welsh miners of Ebbw Vale and Socialism's most bitter...
...campaign. This display of vigor, reinforced by the unexpectedly effective performance of Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell, upset Tory plans for a quiet election and turned the three-week campaign into the toughest-talking election battle since Labor's 1945 victory over Winston Churchill. Said Labor's "Nye" Sevan: "I have seen the squint in [Macmillan's] soul." Macmillan himself, harking back to an old description of Hugh Gaitskell as "a desiccated calculating machine," gleefully cracked: "I still think he is rather desiccated, but his reputation as a calculator is gone with the wind. His promises...
...There's nothing like the threat of annihilation," said one Laborite, "to bring chaps together." In a quiet meeting of the parliamentary Labor party, ousted Bevan was taken back into the fold without a whisper of opposition, and in the party manifesto outlining Labor's platform, Nye Sevan's stand against the nuclear bomb took first place, followed by the usual biting condemnation of everything Tory...
...left wing, not only believes in nationalizing industry; he believes that socialism should exude public ownership as naturally and surely as a spider spins a web. In the Labor Party and in the trade unions, which dominate the party, maturer minds prevail. Only a militant minority shares Nye Sevan's fervor, and it is losing ground...