Leo McKinstry

One Left Foot

The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined

By

Viking 506pp £25 order from our bookshop

The reason why the writer and polemicist Paul Foot has such an exalted reputation has always been a mystery to me. For almost four decades, this hardline Marxist was revered as one of the great campaigning journalists of Britain, widely admired for the passion he brought to his work. Yet I found his writing dreary in the extreme; I cannot remember ever being able to finish one of his Guardian columns. I am told he had a sense of humour, but on the page he appeared capable only of alternating between ideological hectoring and leaden sarcasm.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • One woman 'travelled round the south of India with a retinue of 750 people, fourteen elephants, two racing camels f… ,
    • Stuck for a gift idea for Father's Day? Subscribe to Literary Review and get a FREE copy of 'An Impeccable Spy' –… ,
    • 'Gone. All gone. The ease, the pleasure, the effortless eloquence' From May 1995, Margaret Forster's withering rev… ,
    • RT : SO excited to tell you about this event! 😆 The amazing digital colourist, will be joining w… ,
    • 'Peters was unashamed and evidently unshamable, an impostor who wholly inhabited his fabrications and who indignant… ,
    • ‘At every waking moment Barbara Hepworth was aware of herself as a woman paving the way in a man’s world’ From the… ,
    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    Follow Us