Which is a pity, because this is a more interesting story than that. Honest (within its lights), deliciously caustic about its author’s former ideological stablemates, and sometimes moving in its humanity, we are given one man’s testament to the mid-life realisation that he had got his entire world view wrong. With a touch of Nick Hornby and something of John O’Farrell, Andrew Anthony is never sharper, funnier (or more shocking) than in his descriptions of ideological attitude-striking in 1980s Islington and Hackney. There are anecdotes that should make Margaret Hodge and Tessa Jowell blush, and I’ve never read a better record, first-hand, of the way comprehensive education and the right-on educational philosophies of 1970s schoolteachers let a bright boy from a poor background down. His account of a youthful mission to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas is the first record I’ve read of an episode of leftist internationalism almost forgotten today.

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