Now aged in her mid-seventies, the activist, artist and one-time parliamentarian Joan Coxsedge has penned her memoirs. Cold Tea for Brandy is as entertaining a read as her own varied life seems to have been. Decades of public advocacy, a firm – some would say a fixed – moral compass and an illustrator’s gift for precise impression have given Coxsedge a writing style to be admired. Her prose is brisk, simple, amusing and easy-going, laced with an old-fashioned Australian vernacular. Some readers may find the writing as anachronistic as the socialist beliefs that Coxsedge has so ardently espoused for decades. Still, the clarity of her writing flows organically from the that of her politics.