CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Revelatory history of a disunited kingdom
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain from 1900 to the Present
by Pat Thane
(Cambridge University Press, £22.99)
ONE gets the impression from the number of books recently published about the history of Britain over the past century that many are fairly superficial rehashes of earlier work.
Original significant texts are very much the exception and, while Divided Kingdom falls into neither of these camps, it’s still strongly recommended as a clear, useful and detailed introduction in addressing the themes of period.
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