David Powell's fascinating biography traces Tony Benn's extraordinary fifty-year political career from the day he first entered the House of Commons in 1950. Benn has always been a controversial figure. Nonetheless many of the policies he championed, including some for which he was widely belittled, have since entered the statute books. Indeed, if history is a chronicle of ironies, there can have been little more ironic than when, following Benn's valedictory speech in the Commons in 2001, a Tory backbencher commended him to fellow MPs as Britain's ‘greatest living Parliamentarian.'>