Ben Pimlott was the Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at Birkbeck College, London. He was the author of Labour and the Left in the 1930s (1977), Hugh Dalton (1985) which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography, Harold Wilson (1992) and Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks (1994). He was a political columnist for The Times, New Statesman and Sunday Times and reviewed regularly for the Independent on Sunday, Guardian and Observer.