MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Ambridge it ain’t
ALEX HALL revels in the fascinating details of village life unearthed by a model of local history research
TOP-PRESS EXCLUSIVE: Public phone, located in Kington St Michael, almost certainly used by Jeremy Corbyn to receive socialist instructions from Aneurin Bevan
[Maigheach-gheal/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
The Kingtons: A History of the Ancient Parish of Kington St Michael with Kington Langley
Louise Ryland-Epton
Hobnob Press, £14.95
IN 2015 members of the national press descended on the small village of Kington St Michael in Wiltshire looking for dirt on the then leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn. Alas for them there was little memory of the socialist family that had lived in the village in the 1950s. While a Cllr Corbyn had left their mark in the minutes of the parish council, the family had moved out by the time young Jeremy was seven.
Had the press decided to do actual research they might have found numerous more interesting stories of life in this slightly isolated rural parish that stretches back 1,000 years. Louise Ryland-Epton does the hard archival work in this excellent book and uncovers real lives and a changing community with a degree of granularity that bigger histories often overlook.
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