A staggering journalistic investigation, this is the fourth edition of Seumas Milne’s exposé of how Arthur Scargill was railroaded by just about every section of British society. The press, intelligence services, politicians and his colleagues all had a kick at him over allegations to do with donated money. This is not a blow-by-blow account of the miners’s strike; it is a detailed, dense and complex minute examination of the dirty-tricks campaign Scargill faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is also marvellously exhilarating. If Milne’s detailing were not so scrupulous, his left-wing credentials might have undermined its validity. But as his excellent real-life thriller leaves nothing out, one can only allow one’s head to swirl with a sense of the iniquity and the dishonesty involved.
