It's not often a writer can put across the full essence of life and living in just a few pages. It's the rare person to be so full of the vital energy love of life to be able convey their work, their religion, their education, their love for the people around them, into one combined picture of the miner's life. Skilful writing is a small part of it but the larger comes from the true love of a way of life and everything in it - people with this in them always shine through and this book has that shine. That the way of life is of the Northern miner makes it all the brighter.

Jack Lawson is the archetype of the self-educated Methodist Northern English coal miner. Son of a sailor-miner before him and working from 12, he worked and read and read and worked to organise for his union and eventually to become an MP. He held his dignity in his labour. In his writing he brings this across with conviction, without easy cynicism. It's Lawson's real belief in this dignity in labour, and of the labourer, that steered him true through his varied life. It's easy now for people in Britain to make light of the over-serious northern miner, but it's these people whose lives were spent for us today.

The self-educating, self-supporting and self-respecting working class of the first half of the 20c still stands to me as the peak of the working movement. I don't know what the conditions were that it flourished when and where it did. Body-destroying work as that of working in the collieries wouldn't seem to me to be the environment to grow men like Jack Lawson - but it did. But then they were gone. What do we have now?