Category: Book reviews
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What’s Nigel doing these days?
In the front of our first ever poetry anthology, Routemasters and Mushrooms, I wrote, “the works speak for themselves. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. We intend this collection to be the first of many.” That was 2006. The winning poem, which opens the book, is by Nigel Humphreys. The writers […]
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We girls were double-divided
There’s a puzzling range of controversies raging over ‘entertainment’ and ‘the arts’. Social justice warriors are busy finding items – books, films, statues, to condemn for racism, and whilst libraries obediently bury offending books, the women’s movement battles over misogynistic and mind-bending traditions such as nightclub drag queens crossing yet more boundaries to present as […]
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I’m on strike – Cormoran Strike
Lethal White by Robert Galbraith If anyone asks, I don’t like detective novels – same way I don’t like spy novels. For one thing they’re menz stories set in a menz world, however many dynamic women you put in them (yes, yes, I saw all the innovative series about females acting like the eternal private […]
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How the Gender Identity Industry Broke Politics
Before the world went mad, when I was still Vice-Chair of a Labour CLP, and active with my union, and had a seat on the committee of my favourite lefty group, I started hearing really weird things about sex and gender, including being told by a couple of therapist friends I knew that they were […]
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Two more reasons to celebrate Mo Farah
I nearly didn’t write a blog about Mo Farah. I nearly settled for a Facebook comment… … That’s because – well, he’s famous already, it’s a headline story already, so it doesn’t need one more telling from me – but then I realised there’s something missing from most of the big media stories. Yes, we […]
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The Good, the Bad and the Greedy
Go on, ban more things! Bad News for Labour Someone tried to launch a book at Waterstones in Brighton during the 2019 Labour conference. The shop cancelled the launch. That was all I knew about the book at the time but, as soon as I got home, I marched into my local indie bookshop and […]
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Under-rated heroes and forgotten wives
Happy anniversary, Gustav and Isobel Holst A guest post by author Philippa Tudor Fame and fleeting, modest fortune Aspiring but not-yet-famous composer Gustav von Holst and Isobel Harrison were married on 22 June 1901. It was a quiet wedding in Fulham Register Office (a former workhouse), witnessed by Isobel’s brother and Gustav’s aunt, who had […]
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The original mistake?
Has it ever occurred to anyone that the founding of the Labour Party might have been a mistake from the start? I have spent a large part of my political time over the last decade on campaigns arguing for workers’ rights and women’s rights. The Labour Party has been, to put it generously, a fair-weather […]
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The vital message hidden in those songs
Tonight you’re mine completely… Why were there so many girl groups in the 1960s singing about lost babies? It most definitely is not nostalgia for past boyfriends that makes my heart shiver when I hear those songs, and I know many women who can remember the ‘50s and ‘60s would agree. Social media brings political […]
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Book signing at Thaxted
What is the best way of launching a new biography in Covid-19 times? As 26 March 2022 would have been the birthday of Isobel Holst (born in 1876), singing in the Dulwich Choral Society concert on that day, with a programme featuring works by her husband Gustav and daughter Imogen, as well as by their […]
Kay Green 