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Unspeakable by John Bercow review – now who’s out of order? [09 Feb 2020|07:00am]

John Bercow was a reforming Speaker, but is often blind to his own flaws in this verbose and wrathful memoir

From the age of 12, shortly after starting at what he calls a rough comprehensive in Finchley, north London, John Bercow was afflicted with severe acne. He tells us that he has never been “worried or embarrassed about being short or lacking in physical strength. But I was utterly miserable about my skin.” Cruel schoolmates dubbed him “Crater Face”. The affliction persisted through university. “The psychological damage, the damage to my self-confidence, was considerable and lasted for years.” It was compounded by his parents breaking up after many years of terrible rows and acute bronchial asthma destroying his dreams of becoming a professional tennis player. The young Bercow was “an insecure, sad, lost soul” and “an angry young man”.

It has often struck me that a large proportion of our senior politicians were psychologically wounded when young and seek out the political stage in the hope of gaining the approbation denied to them as children. In few is this as obvious as in the case of the former Speaker. This is memoir as both therapy and revenge. Vengeance on all those who have crossed him during a contentious career. Therapy by trumpeting to the world that “Crater Face” defied those bullying classmates by rising to occupy parliament’s high chair for a decade.

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Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston review – wickedly funny [09 Feb 2020|01:00pm]
These sprightly tales by a rediscovered star of the Harlem Renaissance tackle race and love gone bad

This collection of novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories – among them eight “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales from the 1920s and 30s (recovered from the archives of forgotten periodicals) – highlights her favourite subject: feisty women who deploy whatever strategies are available to escape their bullish men.

Caroline exemplifies this breed in The Country in the Woman. The Florida migrant is spotted in Harlem with an axe over her shoulder seeking her husband, Mitchell, whose mistress is wearing a fur coat he bought. We’re left to imagine the eventual altercation as Hurston teases, describing only its fallout: Caroline’s wiry frame “wrapped in the loose folds of a natural muskrat coat”, while from the head of the axe “hung the trousers of Mitchell’s natty suit”.

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