Roy Hattersley

‘They Never Swung For Me’

White Heat

By

Little, Brown 500p £22.50 order from our bookshop

White Heat is not short of detail. Examining the qualities which made outsider Edward Heath win the race for the Tory Party leadership, Dominic Sandbrook reveals that four different newspapers used the word ‘obsessive’ to describe him, and called him ‘tough’; Sandbrook is as eclectic in his choice of subject as he is meticulous in providing every fact about that controversial decade that even the most demanding reader could possibly desire. When ‘Twiggy’ (or Lesley Hornby as she then was) left school, ‘she weighed just six and a half stones, her shoe size was four and her dress size was six and her bust, waist and hip measurements were 30, 22 and 32 respectively.’

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    • 'A modest and retiring man, Thompson spent his life describing apple varieties and recommending the best – Ribston… ,
    • 'Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palae… ,
    • 'Some scholars attribute Shakespeare’s pre-eminence to four centuries of propaganda and not to the fact that Hamlet… ,
    • RT : We would appreciate any retweets ,
    • We've just stumbled on a gem from the LR archive. The emoluments page from May 1995, in which one reviewer asked to… ,
    • Unlike Mary Shelley's monstrous creation, Jeanette Winterson's Frankenstein-inspired novel feels 'barely alive', sa… ,
    Follow Us