Our host Vick Hope is joined by politician, broadcaster and commentator, Diane Abbott.

Diane has been the Member of Parliament for Hackney and Stoke Newington for more than 35 years. The first Black woman elected to Parliament, she is also the longest-serving Black MP in the House of Commons, and in 2024 became Mother of the House – an honorific title given to the female MP with the longest uninterrupted service. She is the founder of several initiatives, including ‘London Schools and the Black Child’, and ‘Black Women Mean Business’. For 12 years, she appeared as a regular contributor on the BBC’s political digest show This Week. Her memoir, A Woman Like Me, is out now.

Listen to the full episode here and read on to see Diane’s five most influential books by women.

Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

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‘It was the first book I ever bought and I was so proud because in my house there were no books – and of course, I loved the book. Of the sisters, I was Jo, the tomboy. But I think what appealed to me, is that it was a kind of pre-feminist book about women and their lives. […] It was one of the very earliest things that shaped my understanding of what it was to be a woman and how we should support each other, just as the March girls did.’

The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

The Colour Purple

by Alice Walker

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‘[I picked this because] it was part of a wave of Black American women writers at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s. There was Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde – and there was Alice Walker. And it made a huge impact on me, because growing up and being at school, you were never exposed to Black women writers. And it was like fireworks going off in my head to realise there was a world out there which Black women framed, and where Black women spoke for themselves, and wrote about other Black women.’

Heart Of The Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain

by Beverley Bryan

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‘It was a very important book, not least because I knew some of the women who wrote it like Stella Dadzie, but because I had started off with engaging in feminism generally. You had to be quite a determined feminist to stick with it as a Black woman in the 80s.’

Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

by Maggie Haberman

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‘I found this absolutely fascinating. Maggie Haberman was a New York Times journalist, and was physically around Trump from the beginning when he was a property developer in New York to when he became president the first time. So it was a lot more personal in a way than some of the abstract political books about Trump. She was really writing about Trump the man, and to an extent how she engaged with him. She illustrated and made you see how awful he was.’

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Evaristo

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‘One of the things about this book is that it covered the Black woman experience in all its complexity. We’re not just victims, we’re not just matriarchs – it showed us every dimension and every type of experience that we have. […] Some of the other books I’ve chosen show particularly, Black American women’s experiences – but Bernadine showed it in its totality.’

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