James Maxton - Independent Labour Party MP, socialist, orator, Scotsman and the subject of a biography written by Gordon Brown twenty years ago - was not a successful leader, although some of his contemporaries in the 1920s thought he might become one. 'Maxton was never a government minister,' Brown wrote of his subject, 'and his failure to achieve any high office may have been the result of a proper disinclination on the part of a man who knew that his talents were inappropriate. He was accused by some of laziness.'

LRB 3 January 2008 | PDF Download