Wendy Holden
They Moved the Goalposts
The Fleet Street Girls: The Women Who Broke Down the Doors of the Gentlemen’s Club
By Julie Welch
Trapeze 274pp £18.99
In 1973, Julie Welch became the first female newspaper sports reporter on Fleet Street. It was an amazing achievement and her account of how she managed it reads like a Jilly Cooper novel. The story she tells here is not just one of ‘clever, attractive, determined female breaks into man’s world to do the job she loves and succeeds at it’; there’s plenty of strong period flavour too. Julie did her breaking and entering in the era of long-haired footballers with huge sideburns, terraces where people stood up, and press lounges packed with men in sheepskin coats swigging whisky in a fug of Henri Wintermans.
And that’s before we even get to the Fleet Street of the 1970s, which actually was in Fleet Street then. Its culture was so swaggeringly macho that at El Vino’s wine bar women had to go in the side entrance, sit in the back and weren’t allowed to order drinks.
The
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
Twitter Feed
‘In matters of the heart, cats are at the heart of the matter.’
So says @OSoden on the explosion of cat mania in the early twentieth century.
Oliver Soden - Pussies Galore
Oliver Soden: Pussies Galore - Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes
literaryreview.co.uk
A recent inquiry found that British security services had effectively licensed the IRA assassin known as Stakeknife to commit multiple murders.
@malodoherty picks apart the murky world of spying and counterespionage in Northern Ireland.
Malachi O’Doherty - Belfast Confidential
Malachi O’Doherty: Belfast Confidential - Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Espionage, Murder and Justice ...
literaryreview.co.uk
‘Creative non-fiction, I am so sick of this bullshit’, says Michael Anderson, an editor of the New York Times Book Review.
@rosalyster returns to its genesis.
Rosa Lyster - Two Sides to the Story
Rosa Lyster: Two Sides to the Story - The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble Rousers, O...
literaryreview.co.uk