The authors’ respective backgrounds gave them excellent qualifications to write this history of the FIA and the result is a book which should have much wider interest than its bland title suggests.

The book’s title and the fact that it was commissioned for the seventieth anniversary of the FIA may give the misleading impression that it is just a dutiful chronicle bespattered with lots of names of worthy, former officials. On the contrary, it is a lively, readable account of a union in which the rise and fall of political factions mirrored events in the entire labour movement and the community as a whole.