Welsh Journals

for him, the familiar behaviour at the serried ranks of the mostly males who constituted the trade union block votes. Ken Morgan's biography of Callaghan is the work of a first-rate historian at the height of his powers. It is very enjoyable to appreciate the skill with which he uses his archival and oral evidence. It is also easy to admire the way in which he lucidly develops the career of James Callaghan yet constantly places it in a wider context, a context which draws on the latest scholarly work. The end result is distinctly favourable to Callaghan, even though the biographer is often critical of his actions. Yet Professor Morgan does offer darker views of his subject, notably in the conclusion, where he notes that some colleagues 'viewed him as a bully or worse'. One of the very few places in the biography where I was a little taken aback at an assessment was where it is claimed that Callaghan was popular with student audiences. My own experience was very much to the contrary. Callaghan seemed something of a General de Gaulle figure with regard to radical students (and not only in 1968). He was a master of the anti-student gibe. Overall, Kenneth O. Morgan's Callaghan is a biography that will last. It is a further major addition to the historiography of the British Labour movement written by him. To his biography Keir Hardie (1975), a socialist prophet, and Labour People (1987), he has now added a major study of one of Labour's solid, reliable centre figures. His new biography provides a very creditable explanation of James Callaghan's strengths. The most notable of these was summed up in 1971 by Douglas Jay: 'Jim Callaghan is not a great economist. His logic is often not good. But he is very shrewd on political possibilities. That is his strength.' CHRIS WRIGLEY Nottingham PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY AND Civilization: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON R. G. Collingwood. Edited by D. Boucher, J. Connelly, and T. Modood. University ofWales Press, Cardiff, 1995. Pp. xvii, 388. £ 35.00. This is a valuable collection of essays which demonstrates the breadth and variety of Collingwood's interests. Collingwood was a philosophy don at Oxford in the inter-war period. Although perhaps best known for his contribution to the philosophy of history, Collingwood also developed a distinctive general philosophy of his own (in tendency, idealist), was an occasional essayist of some note and also made his own distinctive contribution to archaeological studies.