“the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”

Karl Marx’s dictum sprang to mind as I listened to tonight’s opening episode of Radio Four’s “Call Yourself A Feminist”, the first of ‘three discussions tracing the development of feminist ideas from the 1960s onwards‘.

Those ideas have over the last forty years made enormous differences to the way of life – and death – in the western world, and as such are well worth examination.

The programme, however, was not an examination, but a celebration.

Next week, Linda Bellos and Bea Campbell on feminism in the Thatcher years. I can’t imagine what that’ll be like – can you ?

More of the received view of history – William Gazy reviews the BBC News reporting of the miners strike, 25 years on.

“It was presented rather in the manner Soviet TV must have recalled the 1917 revolution – bloody, glorious, necessary and united against the forces of reaction.”