(Only read a few chapters)

I used to love reading my Dad’s old red hardback copy of Chapman Pincher’s collection science columns for the Express called It’s Fun Finding Out – a title eclipsed on his shelves only by Romping Through Mathematics. Then I found out Mr Pincher was much better known as a spy journalist, particularly the Spycatcher affair. This 1978 work is a memoir of his investigative journalism in that historically ignorant period JustBeforeThatcher. After a few chapters I began to get the feeling, confirmed by Wikipedia, that Mr Pincher is only really bothered by one thing – how the Labour Party is riddled with Communist infiltrators. It may well have been, but the story gets a little dull, and I found hard-going his unreconstructed views on Tom Driberg’s homosexuality (I did though love Churchill’s comment: “[Driberg’s] the kind of man who gives sodomy a bad name”) and on Enoch Powell. All a very different world, sort of pre-UKIP UKIP.