Williams Obstetrics, 25th Edition

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Because of my insistence on honesty in confronting death, my girls show an emotional maturity, compassion and appreciation for life rarely seen in children at their age,” she writes. “I have lived even as I am dying, and therein lies a certain beauty and wonder. As it turns out, I have spent these years unwinding the miracle that has been my life, but on my own terms.” As a woman at the heart of government, many have tried to erase Marcia Williams’s role in Harold Wilson’s premiership – this book makes herstory and ensures she won’t be forgotten.” Stella Creasy MP The most touching of the book’s many interviews is with Ade Adenuga, the owner of the nursing home in which Marcia died, broken and penniless, in 2019. Lady Falkender, Mr Adenuga tells McDougall, was a popular resident who always had a story to tell. I’ll bet she did. I have found that the road has become more and more difficult in recent months,” he wrote. “And the loneliness and hopelessness are incredibly difficult to bear. I could write a treatise about the array of collateral consequences that Julie’s cancer has brought to our lives.”

The rest of her family gradually immigrated to the US and found the work they could, her mother a manicurist, her father a vegetable wholesaler. Their work allowed Julie to attend school, where her mind revealed itself: she received degrees in English and Asian Studies at Williams College in Massachusetts, then went on to graduate from Harvard Law School. When she was three years old, Julie and dozens of family members boarded fishing boats to make a secret escape from Vietnam to Hong Kong. The journey took weeks, with few rations. So I knew of Julie, while she was ill. We had mutual friends, one of whom, Stephanie Lee, had recently died. Another friend asked me to reach out to Julie’s husband, Josh, as he staggered through the horror of slowly losing a spouse. His third book, Billionaire Boy, launched a collaboration with Tony Ross who provided images for his the book and has continued to work with Walliams on his later novels, including the massively successful Awful Auntie, The Demon Dentist, Ratburger and a collection of stories cataloguing The World’s Worst Children. Marcia Williams was the most powerful woman working with the Prime Minister in the history of the office. At last, a book that examines her pivotal importance.” Sir Anthony Seldon

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In 1956, William Faulkner, who hated interviews, took time to describe this impulse to the Paris Review: Behind every great man is a very smart woman, expected to operate below the radar and keep her trap tightly shut in public. Meet Marcia Williams, whose life in the Wilson governments is jaw-dropping. This book is a brilliant take on power, political intrigue and old-fashioned sexism. Has it all changed, or does it linger in the corridors of power?” Baroness Helena Kennedy KC

In 2013, alongside continuing to write his novels for older children, Walliams entered new fictional territory with his first picture book, The Slightly Annoying Elephant, working with his long-term illustrator Tony Ross to write about a big blue elephant who turns up uninvited and starts being very bossy indeed.

She offers an implicit challenge, then, to the rest of us. We may not be able to mark the moment of our deaths on a calendar, but it waits there nonetheless. So we should, by her model, live even as we are dying.

Contrary to what might be the assumption, that Aquinas writes about Jesus in an abstract and philosophical way that is far removed from the approach of the New Testament, Williams argues that they are actually in vital continuity.

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Attentive to the devotional lives of “ordinary” Christians, Williams intends, as he says in the introduction, to clarify what we are doing when we get together to sing “Before the throne of God above” or “Jesu, lover of my soul”. As often, he gently but firmly seeks to correct some popular theological misconceptions, in particular that God is another person in the universe who is fortunate enough to be extremely powerful, but unfortunately happens to be invisible. Over a decade before Margaret Thatcher swept to power, another woman was running Britain from 10 Downing Street: Marcia Williams was the first ever female political adviser to a Prime Minister and was said to have a powerful grip on her boss. T. A. Williams’s name is actually Trevor, not T A. He writes under the androgynous name of T A Williams since 65% of books are read by women. In his first novel, “Dirty Minds” one of the female characters suggests such an imbalance is because men spend far too much time getting drunk and watching football. He could not possibly comment. I include the beginning of the first world war in this novel,” Williams says. “The day after war was declared, 63 men marched out of the Oxford University Press [for the frontline]. That sort of fracture in the lives of that community is pretty akin to the sudden social change we’ve had with Covid-19.” Protagonist Esme, the daughter of one of the editors, decides to collect words that the male editors and lexicographers of the Scriptorium (essentially a large shed of paper and pigeonholes in Oxford) discard. It’s set just as the suffragette movement is gathering momentum, and Esme learns that “all words are not equal”.

Historians have described the relationship between Marcia and Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson as one of the most famous but mysterious partnerships in modern political history. A brilliant tactician, Marcia masterminded Wilson’s multiple election victories. Indeed, he said that but for her ingenuity, he would never have become Prime Minister. The dying of a young mother from a terminal illness is such an obvious wrong that it has a way of galvanizing communities, doctors, onlookers, to take extraordinary measures. The result is that life pulls those women together, like the cinching of a drawstring purse, around a shared experience.

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This is entirely plausible, but it doesn’t account for Marcia’s involvement in her brother’s dodgy slag heaps, or her insistence on having James Goldsmith on the 1976 resignation honours list (drafted in her handwriting, on coloured notepaper). It was the “Lavender list”, as it was known, that besmirched Wilson’s political legacy. Her parents took her to an herbalist in Da Nang and offered him bars of gold for an appropriate poison. They had dressed her in a stained baby outfit, because they didn’t want to waste a clean one for burial. I convinced myself that the memoir was like an apprenticeship in creative writing, in that I changed the way I write, from an academic writer to something that’s much more accessible and entertaining and, you know, readable.” In this passionate and fascinating biography, Linda McDougall seeks to rescue Marcia from previously dismissive verdicts, suggesting a more nuanced context in which to assess her actions and reactions and restoring this trailblazing pioneer to her rightful place in British political history.