Jack Straw
Split Personalities
Breaking the Mould?
By Ian Bradley
Martin Robertson 192pp £8.95; £2.95 paper order from our bookshop
The Labour Party has given so many own-goals to the SDP this last twelve months that it is sometimes too easy to forget that the roots of the conflict go back far beyond the Wembley Conference in January and the Limehouse Declaration the next day. One-man one-vote, Tony Benn, mandatory reselection, and other Jesuitical niceties of Labour's internal arguments may have been the occasion for the launch of the new party (and what a wonderful occasion, save for those of us on the other side), but they were certainly not its cause.
The first value of Ian Bradley's well written book is that it reminds us that the schism which now looks as if it might rend the old Left apart has been on its way for a good twenty years or more. Twenty years ago Hugh Gaitskell and those round him
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Tickets are now on sale for @Poetry_London's 100th issue launch @natpoetrylib as part of the #LondonLitFest on 23 Oct. Hear live readings from an array of brilliant poets in an event that draws on the 33-year history of the magazine.
https://southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/literature-poetry/npl-presents-poetry-londons-100th-issue?eventId=882035
You only have a week left to take advantage of our 500th-issue subscription offer.
Get 5 issues for £5 now.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/lr545/
Joanna Kavenna reviews Maggie Nelson's ‘On Freedom’, ‘a very serious and beautiful book about why “freedom” has become such a vexed term, deployed so often in scenarios where it really means the opposite’.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/in-defence-of-ambivalence