Climbing the Bookshelves
The Autobiography of Shirley Williams
Shirley Williams’s autobiography. Daughter of Vera Brittain and the political scientist George Catlin, she was evacuated to America as a child, became a Labour cabinet minister, broke away to co-found the SDP in 1981, and ended as a Liberal Democrat leader in the Lords. The book covers education policy, the party splits, and the particular difficulty of being one of very few women near the top of British politics in the 1960s and 1970s. That includes, as she puts it herself, her own reluctance to aim for the highest job.
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Richard Harries
Shirley Williams is also a person of very strong conviction, but, as she herself said, she perhaps lacked enough confidence and ruthlessness to aim for the top job. She is a woman who had to fight her way in what was then a very male-dominated world, and, although extremely able, clever and with very passionate convictions, did not have that extraordinary sense of destiny that de Gaulle appeared to have.
Interview · September 2010
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