The captivating memoirs of a Political heavyweight, detailing more than 40 years in government. Sir Malcolm Rifkind's political career has been as glittering as it has been long-lived. Indeed, he served as a minister for eighteen years, longer uninterrupted service than anyone since Lord Palmerston in the nineteenth century. Informed and stimulating, but also more relaxed, amusing and readable than most books of this genre, Rifkind's memoirs include his battles with Margaret Thatcher over Scotland, explain how he helped change Polish history during the Cold War, describe his presence at the Gorbachev-Thatcher summit and tell how he served as both Defence Minister and Foreign Secretary during some of the most turbulent years of the late twentieth century.The book also covers Rifkind's five pivotal years as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, working with MI6, the CIA and both spies and those spied upon. For his robustness, he is currently banned from Russia by President Putin. Rifkind's memoir is serious and funny, wise and self-deprecatory. This is a book about the past and the future.

This volume completes the biography of Peter Struve (1870-1944), one of the most remarkable and influential Russian intellectuals of this century. More than anyone else in his time, Struve was the master of history, journalism, economics, international relations, and practical politics. A scholar and activist, he helped found the Marxist movement in Russia, initiated Marxist Revisionism there, and launched Lenin's career, and he was the theoretician and a cofounder of the Constitutional Democratic Party. After 1905--the years covered in this self-contained volume--Struve became the principal critic of the Russian intelligentsia and the main political ideologist of the anti-Bolshevik opposition during the Civil War and in emigration. His life was a part of the life of Russia as he struggled to craft a liberal democracy and wound up defeated and faced with an emerging totalitarian state. In writing about Struve, Richard Pipes turns biography into history. He lays bare the split soul of the Russian intellectuals--their irresponsibility, unwillingness to compromise, intolerance. Struve, the liberal turned conservative, preached to his countrymen physical and spiritual freedom based on law. He was a Westerner in his championing of social reform, legality, private property, and a vigorous state and foreign policy. This long and rich tradition of liberal-conservatism is recounted against the background of a "monstrous growth of political claims on the individual that caused intellectual and moral independence increasingly to be punished with ostracism, confinement, exile, and death."

"Jack Austin served as a cabinet minister in both the Trudeau and Martin governments and represented British Columbia for over three decades in the Senate. In the 1970s, he served as federal deputy minister of Energy, Mines, and Resources (during the oil crisis), and then Principal Secretary to Trudeau Sr., who later became a travelling companion. Since 2008, he has been an honorary professor at UBC's Institute of Asian Research. His memoir, Unlikely insider, is more than a personal journey; it ruminates on some of the most pressing political issues animating Canadian public life: the move away from a colonial relationship with First Nations peoples, Canada-China relations, bilateral relations with the US, economic security, and the defense of domestic sovereignty. Inclusion, at both the regional and demographic levels, is an import theme recurring throughout the chapters."--

In 1972, Dr Moss Cass found himself minister responsible for Australia's first Department of Environment and Conservation in Gough Whitlam's newly elected Labor government. Long-haired, bearded, unapologetically a champion of progressive causes, Cass was to face an uphill battle. Even within his own avowedly reformist party, he fought against the odds to try to save Lake Pedder, Fraser Island and Kakadu. But Cass's legacy extended beyond environmental politics. As the Minister for Media he issued 12 'experimental' radio licences that laid the basis for today's thriving community radio sector. As the inaugural medical director of the Trade Union Clinic, he helped pioneer a new model of community health care. He advocated for the reform of abortion law and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. This political biography offers an insider's account of a tumultuous time in Australian politics. Cass's story provides a compelling pre-history to many of the key issues in progressive politics today: the environment, refugees, homosexual law reform, the media, and health care.It is also a story about the transformation of the Australian Labor Party: its 'greening' both in regard to environmental politics and its accommodation of new movements for social reform.

Walter Jona was a member of Victorian Parliament for 21 years. These memoirs are an engrossing and often controversial personal recollection. His observations and assessments of parliamentary leaders and colleagues are based on close personal association rather than public image, and he is not afraid to criticise his own party.