Reviewed in the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard:

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/03/indefatigable-socialist-199...

Ulimately, there can never be enough of this stuff in the world. And not all the solipsism and poor punctuation Paul Foot can throw at us will change that. And I appreciate the level he pitches it at - very specific and contemporary, harshing on the fatcats and apologists of the day with a level of detail that's almost Socialist Worker, that is to say, ripped from the daily news, but book-length. I've been redicovering the pleasures of enthusiasm lately with relation to socialism, so it's perhaps a healthy corrective that my cynicism wells up when I see that Paul Foot has cranked out a large number of tracts on "Why you should vote socialist" and "why the socialists have all the answers" and whatever that presumably kept him in at least relative comfort for what can be expected by a socialist journalist, but we'll let that pass. A more substantive criticism is the winkingness of it - there are so many passages where he is so eager to put the boot into so-and-so over the many crimes of the Thatcher era that he neglects to properly explain what's going on - we're just expected to understand that whoever is an enemy of the people and get on the bus. It's a combination of presentism and British working-class pettiness, and it may be good enough for an article in Socialist Worker, but books should have aspirations. ( )