Book review: Leftist history of the UK oil industry offers wider appeal

It is easy to identify the sympathies of the authors. But that does not diminish the vivacity of the tale they have to tell

Any book dedicated to the late Marxist geographer Doreen Massey, the doyenne of her profession of the last half century—as Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation by James Marriott and long-time energy correspondent for leftist UK newspaper The Guardian Terry Macalister is—will especially pique the interest of a left-of-centre audience. Indeed, one is unlikely to find this tome reviewed in the pages of [right leaning UK magazine] The Spectator, nor in the in-house magazines of ‘Big Oil’! It is, however, so much more than a politicised polemic. Rather it is a hugely entertaining, detail-rich expose of how the tentacles of the oil industry—and especially those of BP and Shell—worked their way