SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
A human picture emerges of the man behind a movement
The Life and Times of James Connolly
C Desmond Greaves
(Manifesto Press)
Earlier this year, while designing an exhibition for the TUC on relations between the British and US labour movements, I came across a 1908 photograph of James Connolly speaking at a May Day rally alongside local leaders of the revolutionary syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Jewish Bund and other trade unionists and socialists.
Reproduced on the back cover it shows Connolly in a typical pose, authoritative and forthright in communicating advanced ideas to workers.
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