GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Minnie Pallister: The Voice of a Rebel
Alun Burge
Parthian Books, £20
AN ADOPTED daughter of Wales, a dimly remembered heroine of the labour and peace movement, and a renowned broadcaster and journalist makes for the fascinating tale of the life of Minnie Pallister. Alan Burge’s biography of Pallister is a story of the labour movement itself.
One of three daughters born to Durham coal miner William Pallister, who became a Wesleyan Methodist minister and took his young family to live in Haverford West in Pembrokeshire in 1899. The young Minnie was the middle daughter and became a confirmed socialist and pacifist and campaigned against the Great War alongside her friends Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald.
KENNY MacASKILL reminds us of the unprecedented political career of a Scottish miner’s militant son who stayed the course and true to his roots
Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ represents the first attempt at mass socialist organisation since the CPGB’s formation in 1921, argues DYLAN MURPHY



