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“... There was something unsettling about the serried ranks of New Labour women elected on 1 May last year. All those structured smiles and cheerful jackets gathered round our leader made me feel like a bad-tempered Daily Mail reader or one of those glorious man-hating feminists of myth who live in Hackney and refuse to shave their legs. What I hadn’t realised was that this unmonstrous regiment of women came much closer to representing the end of something – feminism as a natural ally of radical politics – than to representing a key moment in the long march through the institutions ...”

“... more sensibly ask is ‘How to be a mother at all?’ This, in any case, is the point at which Melissa Benn picks up the story – and on which her ‘new politics of motherhood’ is pinned. For Benn, all mothers are working mothers: the mother who doesn’t work is an anachronism, representative, ‘like the miner ...”

“... passed since tea and talk in Baghdad; the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein remain unknown, but Tony Benn is alive and well and coming soon to a concert hall near you. Leaving Parliament in 2001 to devote more time to politics, Benn joined the B-list of political celebrities. He has appeared at the Glastonbury Festival and ...”

“... and doing things, because they didn’t. But socialist feminists in the 1980s and 1990s, as Melissa Benn wrote in the Guardian in 2000, ‘were suddenly considered unfashionable, dull’. Benn, who as a young journalist worked on Sweet Freedom as a researcher, characterised Rowbotham in particular as ‘a ghost ...”

“... is bang on: obviously, you’ll focus your energy on that nudging. This is what Janet Downs and Melissa Benn, in their e-book School Myths, call ‘pseudo-improvement’ – the data look good, but the quality of the learning isn’t. At school level, as Downs and Benn say, it leads to a ‘narrow, impoverished ...”