The Indefatigable Asa Briggs
About this ebook
From humble beginnings in the back streets of Keighley, he rose to become a peer of the realm, one of the Great and the Good. He was Vice-Chancellor of Sussex, the most fashionable of the new universities, and Chancellor of the Open University, the largest. He became President of the Workers’ Educational Association, reflecting his deep commitment to a more equal society. His own life illustrated the power of education to overcome disadvantage.
But for all his success, his was also a story of frustration and disappointment. He took on too much, and in later life was unable to juggle his commitments as once he could. Moreover, the world around him had changed. Once at the centre of things, he found himself on the periphery.
The inner life of Asa Briggs was more turbulent than it appeared from the outside. Even those who thought they knew him well may be surprised by the revelations in this fascinating biography.
About the author
Adam Sisman is a writer specialising in biography, who has written the lives of A. J. P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and John le Carré. His second book, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, won a National Books Critics Circle award. ‘Mr Sisman has an ideal biographical style: inquisitive and open, serious yet not severe,’ Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times, ‘I’d read him on anyone.’ Sisman has also edited several volumes of letters, including two volumes of letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 2019 he published a short book about a con man, The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews.
