On the road with George

Stories abound of figures for whom the allure of the Left is eroded by cynicism and honest self-interest. Most treat their previous affiliation as a species of deluded immaturity; going Right is a natural consequence of growing up, albeit in early middle age. Alan Sillitoe is different. He too in the early Sixties was a radical leftist but his views changed incrementally and, most significantly, as the result of his private ordinance that opinions must be based on personal experience.

His first visit to the Soviet Union is documented in Road to Volgograd (1964), and in his latest book he tells of trips he made at the end of the Sixties and his involvement in the defection, in London, of the Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov. Sillitoe had become the prize of the Soviet intelligentsia, a novelist who was promoted, debated, taught in universities, as the only genuine spokesman for the oppressed working classes of the West.