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

    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    Follow Us