It is rooted in clearly argued convictions not the techniques of the image-makers

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It is rooted in clearly argued convictions, not the techniques of the image-makers. It rates only a fleeting reference in Philip Gould's Unfinished Revolution. But then Tony Crosland truly was an intellectual revolutionary.Kevin Jefferys' excellent book vividly recalls a memorable personality. It shows that Crosland's political record was far from negligible, especially at the education department, where he created polytechnics and comprehensive schools. At his death he was emerging as a powerful foreign secretary. But any long-term reassessment must focus on the thinker and his ideas - prophet and practitioner of the Middle Way, not the Third Way - in Labour's finest hour.The reviewer's `Oxford History of Britain', `The People's Peace' and `Callaghan: a life' have all been reissued by OUP. OLIVER REED was something of a rarity among British film stars, a bearish, scar-faced, larger-than-life figure whose off-screen exploits, notably his heavy drinking and the scrapes that it got him into, brought him more fame and notoriety than his acting career.

As an actor, he made his strongest impression when playing similarly extrovert figures - such as the tortured heroes of Hammer horror movies or the brutal Bill Sikes in Oliver! Most memorable of all was his work with the director Ken Russell on television (as Rossetti and Debussy) and on film in The Devils, Tommy and their first collaboration, Women in Love, in which the nude wrestling scene between Reed and Alan Bates remains one of the most evocative and remarkable sequences of the Sixties. Russell wrote later: I wonder if people would still be talking about the film today if I hadn't included that particular sequence it wasn't in the original script. I didn't think it would pass the censor and I knew it would be difficult to shoot I was wrong on my first guess and right on my second Olly talked me into it. He wrestled with me, ju-jitsu style, in my kitchen, and wouldn't let me up until I said, "OK, OK, you win, I'll do it." Thanks, Olly, we made history.He was born in Wimbledon, south London, in 1938, grandson of the actor- manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree and nephew of the film director Carol Reed, though he later stated, "I never sought anything but advice from my uncle." He denied as apocryphal the tale that he was expelled from 13 schools ("I left of my own free will") but he did run away from home at the age of 17 to become a bouncer at a Soho strip club. He had a brief career as a boxer ("I won the first fight, lost the next, then decided I didn't like being hit") and worked as a mini-cab driver and mortuary attendant before doing National Service as a member of the Medical Corps.After his two years in the Army were finished, he returned to London determined to be an actor: "When I came out I went to my uncle and he said to go into repertory if I wanted to be an actor It was good advice, because I ignored it completely. I don't give a damn for the theatre, films is where it's at." Reed instead took his photograph around to agencies and managed to get bit parts and extra work in British movies including The Captain's Table (1958), Beat Girl (1959, as a teenage loafer), The League of Gentlemen (1960, as a ballet dancer) and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960, as a bouncer).

"Everyone told me not to do horror films," he later stated, "but I wanted to act. I remember standing on a table blowing bubble gum as a child and everyone applauded. I like that."It was a horror film that gave Reed his first major opportunity. Terence Fisher's Curse of the Werewolf (1961) is considered one of the best of Hammer's output, an earnest attempt to understand folklore which spends almost the entire first half examining the origins of the werewolf myth (its portrayal of 18th-century Spain caused the film to be banned in that country for 15 years). As the young man fighting the beast within himself, Reed gave a performance described by one critic as "mesmerising".