Outside in

A read that has taken far too long for me to get round to finishing!While certainly a heavy read, I found myself particularly gripped with Hain's retelling of his youth, growing up in South Africa, his first hand accounts of being amongst the midst of apartheid atrocities leading to his own efforts in being an anti-apartheid militant eventually culminating to his venture among the near highest levels of the Labour government.I enjoyed how personal the retelling of his life came across and how at the end of all that his involvement in the party had achieved, he remained humble and didn't shy away from mistakes he and his party had made in their time in power. Certainly strange reading this over 10 years after its publication, seeing all the hope for what could be done at the time yet seeing many of the same world issues persist to this day!While I still found the second half interesting, I think the first half is stronger. The book loses some of its focus during the years deep in cabinet politics likely due to the range of goings-on at the time, also causing descriptions of events to jump back and forth years between chapters making it a harder read (though this is the first book on politics that I've tackled so maybe I need to get used to the format!)