Thanks David Honeybone for alerting me to this Guardian article, announcing that John Bew’s Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee has won this year’s Orwell Prize. It’s odd that this should pop up in my field of view right now. For my project, Attlee presided over Britain over one of the most crucial nuclear periods, that is, from mid-1945 to the end of 1951. He doesn’t seem to have been hands-on with this issue, other than with the fateful “go for the bomb” decision right after WWII, but he oiled the way for the key scientists and engineers. I should at the very least skim this book, just to make sure I haven’t missed any atomic involvement of his.
