For the early years the most important are Kenneth O Morgan's biography of Keir Hardie and David Marquand's magisterial Ramsay MacDonald. Also fascinating is John Shepherd's superb new biography of George Lansbury and Gordon Brown's Maxton: Parliament's Gain has been academic history's loss!

JH Thomas, Philip Snowden and Arthur Henderson lacked decent biographies for years. Chris Wrigley (Henderson) and Keith Laybourn (Snowden) have recently remedied this, though they are not always easy to get hold of.

For the big figures of the 1920s-1950s, the best are undoubtedly Ben Pimlott's Hugh Dalton, Alan Bullock's three-volume Ernest Bevin (recently abridged to one by Brian Brivati), Herbert Morrison by George Jones and Bernard Donoughue (recently re-issued).

Also of interest might be Chris Bryant's Stafford Cripps and the several Attlee biographies, Kenneth Harris's being the official one and Francis Beckett's the most recent.

The generation below that are served by the most inspirational Labour biography yet written, Micahel Foot's compelling two-volume Aneurin Bevan. Foot's masterwork is a tribute to his hero, and written from the perspective of a committed Bevanite. A more sceptical/ Gaitskellite approach is taken by John Campbell in his Bevan biography, which is also well worth reading. On Bevan's wife, Jennie Lee, Patricia Hollis's biography is the standard work.

For Gaitskellites Phillip Williams's official biography, and Brian Brivati's more recent biography are both unmissable. Harold Wilson has the three immensely fat biographies from Philip Ziegler (official) Austen Morgan and Ben Pimlott. Callaghan has the equally fat (and also very good) biography from Kenneth Morgan.

Of other more recent figures, Edward Pearce's Denis Healey is racy and readable, as befits a book written by one of the Lobby's best sketchwriters, Kevin Jefferys's Crosland is excellent, as is Susan Crosland's more personal memoir of her husband and Tam Dalyell's biography of Dick Crossman, written by one of those who understood him best, is insightful and underrated. Russell galbraith's biography of Tam Dalyell is also more than worth a look.

More recently, Martin Westlake's Neil Kinnock is fascinating. Also worth reading are Paul Routledge's lives of Betty Boothroyd, Arthur Scargill, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, Donald Macintyre's Peter Mandelson and Andy McSmith's John Smith. McSmith has also written the single most indispensable book to understanding the Labour Party of the 1990s, Faces of Labour, a multi-biographical work based around Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Clare Short and Peter Mandelson.

Other multi-biographies include Peter Shore's Leading the Left and Kevin Jefferys excellent edited collections Leading Labour (biographies of dozen Labour leaders) and Labour Forces (a dozen biographies of those who were almost Labour leaders). Two of the best are Kenneth Morgan's Labour people and David Marquand's The Progressive Dilemma. For the full monty see Greg Rosen's Dictionary of Labour Biography, which contains essays on the three hundred most significant figures in Labour history from Hardie to Blair, or Paul Routledge's more fun-sized Bumper Book of British Lefties.