Denis Becket's  Radical Middle is an amazing journey through the turbulent 80's. An important journey in that it is a trip made by an unlikely fellow. We expect books like these to be detailing the journeys of the darker skinned brothers of this continent of ours, in that most of us in those heady days of apartheid slightly ignored the travels and trials of our brothers and sisters from the other side of the divide.

Neels Blom, www.newstime.co.za November 29, 2010

Citizens who have attained fishing age will remember the republic’s second referendum, held in 1983, when South Africa’s whites-only voters were asked to say yes or no to the National Party’s tri-cameral parliament, an institution which would entrench the disenfranchisement of the country’s African majority.

Denis Beckett, in his new book, Radical Middle: Confessions of an Accidental Revolutionary, reminded me of that decade of heavy state oppression, bombs in street bins, economic sanctions – and Frontline magazine. If you were youngish and whitish in the 1980s, it was hip to profess pinko-liberal politics, wear a Che Guevara T-shirt and have the colour of your skin modified by the Purple People Eater during an illegal gathering. Those days the thinking pinko South African’s magazine of choice was Frontline, all seven of us.