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My book will be out in less than a month, and it has a beautiful cover - huge thanks to @OUPHistory @OUPAcademic. The book itself contains a ‘Note on the Cover’, but because the first question everyone asks when they see it is ‘which one is Michael Young?’, a thread:/
This is Michael Young. You might know him as the architect of the Labour Party’s 1945 election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, the author of Family in Kinship in East London (1957), or as the guy who came up with the term meritocracy (though he actually possibly didn’t)./
My book uses Young to examine the relationship between social science and left-wing politics in Britain from the 1940s to the 70s. There are many photos of Young, but I liked the idea of portraying him amongst a network of social researchers, many of whom appear in the book./
The photo was taken in 1958, when researchers from Young’s Institute of Community Studies, now the @the_young_fdn, visited @dartington, a medieval manor in Devon which was turned into a progressive community in the 1920s by the philanthropists Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst.
Young was educated at the Dartington School; the Elmhirsts encouraged, mentored, and in many cases directly funded Young and his colleagues’ research and activism; and Young took the title Baron Young of Dartington when he was made a member of the House of Lords in 1978./
The man looking cheerfully towards the camera in the back is the sociologist Peter Willmott, Young’s frequent collaborator, who is probably best known as the co-author of Family and Kinship in East London./
In the back on the left is Enid Mills, who researched mental illness at the Institute of Community Studies. The woman next to her, unfortunately obscured by Young’s head, is probably Ewa Zweig, a pianist and the daughter of the polish sociologist Ferdynand Zweig./
This is Richard Titmuss, the first chair of Social Administration at the London School of Economics. Titmuss was arguably the dominant figure in mid-century British social research and social policy in the 1950s, and was Young’s PhD supervisor./
Titmuss was an important mentor for Young. But he was rather skeptical of Young’s (somewhat creative) approach to social research - an attitude which, I like to think, is somewhat reflected in his body language here)./
The woman hidden behind Titmuss is Marjorie Durbin, widow of the economist and Labour MP Evan Durbin, author of the 1940 Politics of Democratic Socialism./
This wonderfully dressed woman is Daphne Chandler. Chandler worked at the Institute of Community Studies and appears in the acknowledgements of The Rise of the Meritocracy, Family and Kinship in East London, and other ICS publications./
Finally, this is Phyllis Willmott, the social policy writer and memoirist who was married to Peter Willmott./
The photo is held in Phyllis Willmott’s diaries at @ChuArchives, which are a phenomenal (if slightly hard to decipher) resource on post-war social research, and life amongst intellectuals and progressive policy makers in 1950s and 60s London./
(Huge thanks, as ever, to @ChurchillArchive for the photo and for being such a wonderful place to research.)
Not everyone pictured here is discussed in the book, but I hope the cover brings to life some of the intellectual, philanthropic, and personal networks of post-war British social science and social policy which I have tried to portray in it.
The book is up on the OUP website and Amazon and release date is (apparently) September 3rd. £60 may be a bit steep for many, but I’d be very grateful if academic friends and followers could pre-order it for their university libraries 
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