MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
Copper Lady: Life in the Met and Lords
Plodding plod account of rising through the police ranks
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New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production that panders – if inadvertently – to Western prejudice against China
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
ALEX HALL recommends a book that places empirical evidence at the heart of understanding racism
BILLED as the book that reveals the corruption, racism and heavy drinking rife in the Metropolitan Police, Copper Lady is a ponderous potted history of Jenny Hilton, potentially a pioneering police officer, that could have been so much more.
There has been fundamental change during her tenure at the Met, although it takes seven chapters before we even get to her joining the force.
Her journey starts in the 1950s, when women made up just 1 per cent of the service and were left to deal with prostitutes, teenagers and neglected children and ends with her elevation to the peerage in the 1990s, when she spoke out against the Iraq war.
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