Party Animals

Growing up in the Britain of the postwar left, David Aaronovitch lived in a world most people never saw. It was a life of picket lines, militant unions and rallies in support of overseas Communists, with the Red Army Choir on the record player and the Daily Worker on the table, all resting on a steady affection for the Soviet Union.

His book follows his own family through this milieu, drawing on letters, diaries and secret service files. Those documents bring back his childhood recollections, and the result mixes memoir, history and biography in a single account.

At its core is the way private loyalties and public politics became entangled, with painful consequences, and how one family tried to make sense of its place in the twentieth century.