Laura Beers’s most recent book is Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist.
I am not the first member of my family to make the reverse migration from the United States to the ‘Old Country’, as my grandfather (who wasn’t of British or Irish descent) used to refer to the UK. In the summer of 1942, grandpa set sail from New York harbour for Northern Ireland. He arrived in early July and stayed for the next two years, first in Ireland and then...
Of the 156,000 British, Canadian, American and other Allied troops who sailed from Portsmouth for the Normandy beaches in June 1944, fewer than 1500 are still alive. They are all in their nineties, at least. My grandfather, a D-Day veteran who died in 1998, would be 103.
Last month, President Trump announced his nominee to succeed the retiring Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy. Brett Kavanaugh is currently a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. He has not been an outspoken opponent of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that the right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman’s choice to have an abortion. But he is almost certain to support a dramatic narrowing of Roe’s application, allowing states to impose significant restrictions on a woman’s ability to access abortion.
At first sight, a new life of Ellen Wilkinson appears to offer readers a return to ‘old Labour’ principles, as articulated and put into practice by one of the party’s most...
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