I'm knocking on for half way through it, so here's an interim. The childhood/early politicisation section is rather sketchy, a lot more so in fact than Journeyman. However, it's important to remember that Harker was constrained partly by budgetary considerations on the part of the publisher and partly by the paucity of corroborative material. Understandably, Harker seems unwilling to accept MacColl's biography on its own. In truth, the book should have been three times as long. But we are lucky to have this much.

Having said, the section on Theatre Workshop is absolutely riveting and, while it's very boiled down, contains an enormous amount of information.

I've just got to the section where he meets Alan Lomax and Bert Lloyd, and starts to entertain ideas of a working class folk revival. I've still got a bit of ground to cover there, but a fascinating picture is starting to emerge of how MacColl's ideas on proletarian culture were changed around this period.

The tale of MacColl's desertion and subsequent arrest is dealt with in some detail and a different picture emerges to the one which I had previously entertained. For some reason (I may have dreamt it, or it may have been on the MI5 file), I was under the impression that MacColl had enlisted before he could be called up. He wasn't. He was conscripted and deserted several months later. The precise reasons aren't spelt out but it seems to have been a mixture of disaffection with the politics of the war(the British CP line at that time was one of opposition, on the grounds that it was an imperialist war), and dislike of service life.

Also, and I haven't been back and checked, but I recall Joan Littlewood's autobiography saying that MacColl was arrested on suspicion of desertion after the war and released because the police were looking for someone else of the same name. In fact, he was hauled off to Oswestry barracks, and eventually discharged as being unfit for military service.

I've spotted several minor mistakes in the text, but up to now,I have only one real disagreement. At this stage of the revival, MacColl and Lloyd were far amenable to American culture and to skiffle than Harker seems to think.

There's one other curious bit. The book says "Jean Newlove.....presented her troupe of East End girls to the Festival Hall audience (MacColl thought of the as a 'proletarian dance ensemble' like those he'd seen in Bulgaria". It's difficult to make much of this without having access to the WMA bulletin from which Harker quotes. But the suggestion I'm getting is that MacColl might have been far more receptive to eastern European state folklore troupes in the mid 1950s, than subsequently.

The book is extremely well written and very readable. Anyone who hasn't got a copy should go out and buy one. This is easily the most important commentary on a cultural icon of the folk revival that I have ever come across.