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A Life and a Half
The Unexpected Making of a Politician
A Life and a Half
The Unexpected Making of a Politician
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Description
Product details
| Published | 02 Dec 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 336 |
| ISBN | 9781526680907 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Dimensions | 234 x 153 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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This absorbing memoir is the kind of book those who bemoan career politicians will love – it stops when Chris Bryant becomes the MP for Rhondda in 2001. Instead, it focuses on his formative years growing up with an alcoholic mother and absent father, suffering sexual abuse, and being ordained into the priesthood. A Life and a Half is perceptive, revealing and full of suppressed trauma, but it can also take on the quality of a mischievous confessional, particularly when recounting wild times in Latin American Christian ministries. Unorthodox but beguilingly human
Ben East, Observer
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Bryant is one of the handful of sitting MPs who can genuinely write. As you'd expect, A Life and a Half is a terrific book, funny, frank and moving in equal measure. It is not just a story of changing careers: in many ways it is a story of coming to terms with yourself . . . Although it is not a political memoir, it is in many ways the story of how Bryant went from a boy unable to speak to one of Parliament's most eloquent MPs. We can only hope that we might one day get an account of everything that has happened to Bryant in the 21st century that is half as good as this book
Stephen Bush, Financial Times
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Startling . . . Filled with a litany of Bryant's eye-popping escapades
Mark Paul, Irish Times
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Charming, unexpected, honest
RORY STEWART
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This is a riveting read: self-revelatory, candid about others, and packed with outrageous stories . . . This autobiography is also the story of a man who survived an appalling childhood to lead a varied and worthwhile life as a priest and then politician . . . All told with self-deprecating humour
Richard Harries, Church Times
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It is often said that the politicians of today have no hinterland, but then along comes Chris Bryant with a fascinating, frank, funny and moving account of how he became one; from young Conservative wannabe actor, Welsh-born, raised in Spain, to Church of England priest, to first out gay Labour MP in Wales. And all before his fortieth birthday
REVEREND RICHARD COLES



















