Reviews
The Observer
John Kampfner
“Although overly long (I do wish editors would take out their pruning shears occasionally), this is an entertaining read. The reader will skip over tracts about fairly mundane figures in Livingstone's City Hall entourage and focus on his role as a leading figure of the left for two decades ... The most heart-rending chapters focus on his early life.”
06/11/2011
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The Sunday Times
Rod Liddle
“This is a very long autobiography, considering the man responsible for it owes his notoriety to being, effectively, just mayor of Toytown for a while; a job with a strictly limited remit except for grandstanding, mischief-making and annoying car drivers. However, within that remit, Ken Livingstone undoubtedly excelled and, with one or two caveats, this is a thoroughly entertaining and sharply amusing book.”
06/11/2011
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The Guardian
Seumas Milne
“This book is not for the faint-hearted: no nuance of the battles for Lambeth's housing department in the 70s is spared ... But it comes alive in Livingstone's evocation of each period: of the brazen racism of the late 60s Labour right and local Maoist groups organising night-time training to prepare for an armed uprising in the 70s — along with his accounts of conflicts and causes, from Rhodesia and Vietnam to Afghanistan. It's still startling to be reminded of the scale of the 80s hate campaigns waged against him...”
05/11/2011
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The New Statesman
Chris Mullin
“For the most part it is highly readable, told with the author's wit and honesty. There are moments when those who do not share our hero's interest in the minutiae of London politics may wish to skip pages but, by and large, this is a story that ought to be of interest to friend and foe alike.”
14/11/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Sonia Purnell
“At 700 pages, the book is too long and the entire chapter on his youthful travels in Africa could have been excised without any great loss. But it is also often engaging. It is impossible to read the disproportionately virulent invective fired at him from his critics and not marvel that he was elected twice as Mayor of London and continues to be up for the fight. His refusal to accept when he has got it wrong plus a ruthless approach to opponents — casually dismissed as paedophiles, racists or incompetents — is also, on occasion, startling.”
06/11/2011
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The Evening Standard
Andrew Neather
“Absorbing but over-long … Livingstone adds few revelations to Andrew Hosken's fine 2008 biography. There are a few nuggets, such as the uniquely ghastly former Labour general secretary Margaret McDonagh asking him to lead a rebellion against Gordon Brown in 2009. What is more interesting is the fine grain of London politics. Livingstone's grasp of detail and numbers — how to mount ward-by-ward campaigns against enemies, how to manage a tricky housing budget — is overwhelming. This is a man who from the late 1960s appears to have thought about little except politics.”
27/10/2011
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The Spectator
Ed Howker
“... were you to believe this autobiography, you might think that Ken Livingstone is the only competent politician in Britain. Put plainly, he has produced the single most ambitious act of self-justification in modern political memoir. If you are a professional rival, a sceptical bureaucrat, if you once met him in a pub and accidently trod on his foot, you’ll almost certainly find some disobliging reference to yourself in this book.”
26/11/2011
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The Times
Ann Treneman
“I lost too many hours of my life reading Ken Livingstone’s tome of an autobiography … This book is dense, detailed to the point of near insanity, low on life story, high on political tedium and fabulously, wonderfully vitriolic. If there was a Museum of Insults, this book deserves to be in it.”
05/11/2011
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The Independent
Boyd Tonkin
“He exposes so much rivalrous, ambitious esprit de l'escalier in answering critics that his staircase of belated put-downs would reach higher than Renzo Piano's 1000-foot glass Shard – "one of the most beautiful modern buildings in the world" … The surly nit-picking of his vindication leaves no room for a vision that might stir the sceptics ... [A] sectarian and solipsistic work”
18/11/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Andrew Gilligan
“For 700 gruelling pages, we are trapped in Ken’s political vivarium, breathing the smells, fighting off the circling bluebottles, reliving a lifetime’s struggles for vital centimetres of tank space ... Reading his parade of defamatory fantasies, I felt almost embarrassed on his behalf. I get 20 entries in the index — almost as many as his wife.”
27/11/2011
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