But the images with their mix of Mexican folk imagery and modernism are highly self-conscious on Kahlo's part. She constructs her own image: dresses herself in Mexican national costume (when she isn't in male attire), paints herself in it and makes sure there are photographs as well.
But Mexican peasant she was not. Her German father and Mexican mother were middle class and urban. She certainly supported the national revolution fought by the peasant leaders Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, but she wasn't one of them.
Although the current exhibition at Tate Modern, her first solo show in this coun try, tries to go beyond the Havoc in its third year (Review books) E7.99, reviewed by Piers Mostyn I'm not a big fan of historical fiction. The story gets in the way of the history or the other way round.
Either way it often feels like a BBC costume drama in paperback. But this novel is an exception.
Set in the pre-revolutionary England of the 1630s, a town in Yorkshire has been taken over by puritan governors who set about enforcing work discipline, Calvinism and the new moralism.
We sense the earliest stirrings of the new capitalist economy. Clearances are taking place, enclosures are being torn down and the poor deprived of access to common land.
Bands of dispossessed vagrants roam the countryside, setting up shanty-style encampments on the edge of town.
In a time of economic insecurity there are harvest fallures. Urban disorder Is ever-present. Tax cuts are offered to the well-to-do to curb urban flight; the poor law is cut back.
Rumours abound of armed horsemen at night - invariably presumed to be the French, the Irish or traitors from within.
"Papist" plots are suspected around every corner and priests are fugitives, hunted down till they swing from the gallows.
Zero tolerance is the governing principle, with sweeps of undesirable neighbourhoods, spot checks on foreigners and a radical extension of the town governors repressive powers.
Sounds familiar doesn't It? This novel is to the 21st century new world order what Arthur Miller's The Crucible Is to McCarthyite America in the
The main character, coroner John Brigge, has joined the new dispensation as a governor, but has increasing doubts.
His ambivalence to the new evangelism leads to his downfall and he ends up aligning with the most despised and downtrodden: vagrants, prisoners and the diseased.
Interweaved with this tale is the prolonged trauma of the birth of his baby chlld. And there are miscarriages of justice.
Irish visionary Katherine Shay, leads a prison riot, preaching "what could rich men do against poor men, If poor men rise and hold together, for there are more poor than rich".
Belfast-born Bennett was interned in the 1970s. In the 1980s he worked for Jeremy Corbyn MP as a researcher and was barred from the House of Commons for alleged republican connections.
This is his fourth novel and, like the previous ones, he has Inevitably drawn on elements of his own experience.
This one, however, is a clean break from the Graham Greene style of his earlier political thrillers.
Fluently written with superb use of language taken from the King James Bible of the period, this is his best yet.
page 24 of the scan
socialist No. 27. Summer 2005