Laura Beers

Laura Beers’s most recent book is Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist.

From The Blog
11 October 2022

In her speech to the Conservative Party conference last week, as well as overseeing the expulsion of a pair of young Greenpeace protesters and attacking the spectre of an ‘anti-growth coalition’, Liz Truss told a story from her childhood:

From The Blog
12 October 2020

Two years ago, I wrote a piece for this blog about my decision to have an abortion. It was the most difficult decision I’ve ever made, and the most difficult piece I’ve ever written. Abortion is a common procedure. An estimated one in three British women and one in four American women will have an abortion by the time they’re 45, yet most women who have terminated a pregnancy keep their decision secret, driven often by a sense of guilt and shame. I would not have shared the story of my own abortion but for the threat posed to abortion rights by the Trump administration’s nomination and ultimate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As I type, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are making their opening statements in the confirmation hearings of Trump’s third appointee to the US Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett.

From The Blog
3 June 2019

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.

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...

From The Blog
9 August 2018

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.

Fiery Particle: Red Ellen Wilkinson

Lawrence Goldman, 13 July 2017

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...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences