"On the intellectual side, I attended a variety of lectures which seemed to me brilliant and what I really needed in Oxford, by people like Asa Briggs, Christopher Hill, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the incomparable and deeply entertaining Alan Taylor.

"[2] He returned to Oxford for doctoral work, specializing in the role of Wales in British politics in the late 19th century, with a focus on Gladstone.

Kenneth Morgan is the author of many works, such as The People's Peace, his notable history of postwar Britain, and has completed biographies of many politicians, including David Lloyd George, Keir Hardie, James Callaghan, and Michael Foot.

He is the editor of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, to which he contributed the two final chapters (1914–2000 and 2000–10), and which has sold close on a million copies.

Wales in British Politics, 1868–1922, dealt with the enlarged franchise, the campaign for disestablishment, Home Rule legislation (mainly with regard to Ireland) and contrasting attitudes to an imminent World War.

In the 1950s to 1970s, labour history was redefined and expanded in focus by a number of historians, amongst whom the most prominent and influential figures were E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm.

Morgan was a more traditional liberal historian who followed the new trends and explains their dynamic: the ferocity of argument owed more to current politics, the unions’ winter of discontent [in 1979], and rise of a hard-left militant tendency within the world of academic history as well as within the Labour Party.

I recall addressing a history meeting in Cardiff...when, for the only time in my life, I was subjected to an incoherent series of attacks of a highly personal kind, playing the man not the ball, focusing on my accent, my being at Oxford and the supposedly reactionary tendencies of my empiricist colleagues.