CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Unfinished business
WILL PODMORE explores new biography that appeared without the involvement of Mick Lynch himself
RMT general secretary Mick Lynch joins the RMT picket line outside Newcastle Central station July 22, 2023
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
Mick Lynch: the making of a working-class hero
Gregor Gall, Manchester University Press, £20
GREGOR GALL is Visiting Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Leeds and author of Bob Crow: socialist, leader, fighter (2017) among other books. This is a useful biography of Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. It is also a study of the relationship between trade union struggles and the struggle for socialism.
It should be said at the start that the RMT did not authorise this book, as Gall acknowledges in an appendix: “On August 23 2022, Lynch was approached to be interviewed for the writing of this book... the response on September 2 was that ‘he is not interested in participating in this project’.”
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