someone who has lived the life, who has been part of a life of politics and power, who knows what people feel when they are near to the centre of power. Near to the heat of the kitchen." He called the traditional biography a "Stratfordian fantasy." On the subject of Shakespeare's will, he says, "That is a will in which this great spirit, this man of immense learning and vision, not only bequeathed no books..." but he also neglected to bequeath "the most valuable thing he had to bequeath, the remaining manuscripts of his plays which were eventually to be published seven years after his death." Powell calls the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare in the First Folio, and the monument to Shakespeare in Stratford "a mask," "a fix," "a spoof" to conceal the identity of the true author. Powell's rhetorical gifts were also employed, with success, beyond politics. He was a poet of some accomplishment, with four published collections to his name: First Poems; Casting Off; Dancer's End; and The Wedding Gift. His Collected Poems appeared in 1990. He translated Herodotus' Histories and published many other works of classical scholarship. He published a biography of Joseph Chamberlain, which treated the split with William Gladstone over Irish Home Rule in 1886 as the pivotal point of his career, rather than the adoption of tariff reform, and contained the line: "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of all human affairs". His political publications were often as critical of his own party as they were of Labour, often making fun of what he saw as logical fallacies in reasoning or action. His book Freedom & Reality contained many quotes from Labour party manifestos or by Harold Wilson that he regarded as nonsensical. When asked by BBC interviewer Michael Parkinson what he regarded as his achievements, he replied "it is doubtful whether any man can say how the world was altered because he was in it." In August 2002, Powell appeared 55th in the List of 100 Greatest Britons of all time (voted for by the public in a BBC nationwide poll). In March 2015, The Independent reported that Powell was one of the MPs whose activities had been investigated as part of Operation Fernbridge. His name had been passed to police by Paul Butler,