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Novelist’s anti-Corbyn outburst speaks volumes
Jeremy Corbyn at a photocall after delivering the Alternative MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival

BLASTS from the past are unexpected by definition. But when I discovered the young adult novelist William Sutcliffe had been in the Edinburgh International Book Festival tent alongside me to hear from Jeremy Corbyn and Yanis Varoufakis this week, I was still taken aback.

Sutcliffe’s book Bad Influence was foisted upon us in my third year of secondary school. It’s the tale of Ben and Olly, two innocent middle-class kids whose world is turned upside-down by the arrival of an older boy, Carl — who goes to, or bunks off from, “the unit” rather than normal school and whose mum has nothing in her kitchen cupboards.

It was not exactly a great work of literature, but it did deliver a few thrills, including a vicious card game called “knuckles” and our hapless English teacher, an ex-BBC man, having to say the S-word while reading to the class.

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