ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Late Fame, The Death of Robin Hood, Leviticus, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
The Searchers
Andy Beckett, Allen Lane, £30
IT is impossible to read this book without a certain sense of pathos. Five years ago, three of its subjects — Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell — were on the verge of acceding to the highest offices in the land should Labour secure election victory.
Today, one struggles for re-election as an independent against his old party, another has just emerged from a 13-month suspension and brief barring from standing for Labour, and all three are marginalised within party and Parliament.
Guardian writer Andy Beckett ties their stories together with their contemporary Ken Livingstone and their predecessor Tony Benn in a collective quasi-biography that ambitiously aims to tell the story of the Labour left over the last 50 years or so.
Preferable to Starmer he may be, but there is scant sign of a sharp political break in Burnham’s policies so far — while left challenges aren’t making much of a running either, finds ANDREW MURRAY. How can socialism be put back on the map?
Can entrenched institutional power be overcome?
PETER MASON welcomes collected writings from Britain’s first black female publisher that focus on the place of black writers in literature
Star cartoonist MALC MCGOOKIN finds lessons for today in the punch, and the economy of line, of an extraordinary generation of illustrators



