A passionate book on the last woman to be hanged in Britain uncovers some uncomfortable memories for Gerald Isaaman

RUTH Ellis shot her errant lover David Blakely outside the Magdala Tavern, in South Hill Park, Hampstead, on the Easter Bank Holiday of April 10, 1955, just a week before I began work as a junior reporter on the Ham and High.
So her sordid story has stayed with me, the saga of the peroxide-blonde-nightclub-hostess-cum-prostitute as presented by the press was an open and shut case, to which she had openly pleaded guilty when the police arrived.
The jury at her trial took a mere 23 minutes to convict her and 50 years ago this month Albert Pierrepoint, the public executioner, put the noose around her neck in Holloway Prison – and she became, notoriously, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

Private Eye founder Richard Ingrams’s book on arguably our first journalist gives us many invaluable lessons, writes Geoffrey Goodman

HE was arguably, the most remarkable radical writer/polymath in English history and possibly the original controversial trenchant journalist – the man who set a template for all subsequent bellowings of the printed word in demanding the transformation of society for the benefit of the common people.
His prime concern was to oppose ‘The Thing’ – his label for the establishment, oiled with corruption. His name was not Thomas Paine nor even Daniel Defoe but William Cobbett.
Many learned literary classics have been written about Cobbett for more than a century claiming him as the precursor of early radicalism across the entire political spectrum and naming him as the “first modern journalist”.
It is difficult to believe there is much new to say about this extraordinary man: yet Richard Ingrams, founding editor of Private Eye, has succeeded.
He has produced a surprisingly fresh and vibrant picture of Cobbett, full of fascinating glimpses of the man whom Ingrams, with considerable skill, brings back to life.