MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Labour Women in Power by Paula Bartley
Account of the only five women to achieve Cabinet posts in Labour governments up to 1997
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
IN THIS new and well-researched history of five Labour women — the only ones to get Cabinet posts in the period from the Labour Party’s birth in 1900 to the Blair government in 1997 — Paula Bartley uncovers the very male world that these women worked in and documents their own individual paths to power.
Formidable but flawed: Barbara Castle (Pic: National Archives of Malawi)
Of the five— Margaret Bondfield, Ellen Wilkinson, Barbara Castle, Judith Hart and Shirley Williams — Bondfield came from the poorest background, with the least education. But she was the first woman to chair the TUC, the first to hold a ministerial post in 1924 and the first to be a Cabinet minister in 1929.
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