PA is an ardent pacifist and socialist. She is a well-known activist who has been involved in efforts to bring about nuclear disarmament. She has also participated in anti-Vietnam war and other peace efforts, and has run for election on socialist tickets.

DM takes a keen interest in politics, about which (in the broadest sense) her writings are more and more concerned. On the nuclear-weapons issue she has declared herself an avowed anti-nuke,but she has provided a notably unaligned voice on the problems of Northern Ireland, and has attempted to give a balanced view of other politically anguished places that she has written of.

She is an English feminist who has allowed little information about her family origins to be known. In a lecture given in Spain she said she came from a middle-class background, and in a lecture for the National Secular Society she said that we were Church ofEngland—though they did not go to church on Sunday but spent the time in the compulsory family hobby of sailing. Sent to a RomanCatholic school (though not subjected there to pressure to convert), she was convinced by the age of fourteen that the Catholic faith was the true one: the only question was whether she had the courage to face the family teasing that converting would bring down on her head. As a compromise, she settled for beginning to follow the family religion seriously, receiving confirmation in the Anglican Church and becoming a regular attender at early morning Sunday sung Eucharist. Later, joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament brought her into contact with an articulate young male agnostic, and by the time she reached university she was an agnostic herself. Actual opposition to institutional religion came later, after she became a feminist and learned about the woman-hatred that is embedded in many of the world's major religions.

MG 's novels are deeply marked by the various threats that dominated the late twentieth century: nuclear damage, global warming, urban disintegration. They often centre on the particular difficulties and dilemmas of women's lives and the way the personal is imbricated with the political. Sometimes Gee explores the same theme in more than one novel; she has once gathered together characters from several earlier novels. She has not abandoned the interest in formal experiment with which she began, even though content may now be the dominant interest in her work. She also writes reviews, stories, plays for radio and television, and other minor genres, and has published an unusually-conceived memoir.

Initially she was a researcher, preparing reports on periodical publications and selecting historical topics for other government departments. In 1944 she began writing for the British Ally (Britansky Soyuznik), a propaganda paper issued by the British government in Moscow (though she remained based in London). As a science editor, she wrote primarily on such issues as the use of insecticides in preventing the spread of typhus and, increasingly, on the development and use of bombs. Through this work she expanded her knowledge of nuclear armament, against which she soon began protesting.

MB , who collaborated with her first husband, Sydney , in the mid twentieth century on numerous plays (the more than fifty which preceded the Second World War included two volumes of one-acters with all-female casts) and some film scripts, was also a remarkably versatile author on her own account. She was a solo scriptwriter and dramatist, a novelist (notable for the satirical, feminist, post-nuclear fantasy The Big Switch), autobiographer, biographer, and feminist publisher and editor. She has another claim to fame in being one of the first British women to direct films.

Born to Fabian socialist parents, JD was a lifelong socialist herself, and became active in the British campaign against nuclear weapons.

NM was involved in pacifist and later in anti-nuclear politics, participating in the Authors' World Peace Appeal during the Cold War in the 1950s, and heading political demonstrations against NATO installations in Strathclyde in the early 1960s. She became active in FREEZE , an international organisation lobbying governments against making a first strike, and lent support to the women at Greenham Common protesting against placement of Cruise missiles on British soil.

PF had a dazzling success with her first novel in 1927. She went on to publish more than thirty novels, as well as plays for stage and radio, short stories, autobiography, and an important anti-nuclear pamphlet. Despite several Virago reprints, she has not received the critical attention she deserves.

Her parents belonged to the educated, professional middle class, and were practising Christians within the Church of England , where (even to a teenager beginning to experience doubts) the services were beautiful with candlelight and music, incense and ceremony and stained glass, the incomparable rhythms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.DL was also exposed to Judaism as a child. As an adult she formally converted to Christianity in 1984 and to Catholicism in 1990. She had early experience of various left-wing causes: seeing her father on a soapbox protesting Mussolini 's invasion of Abyssinia; my father and sister both on soapboxes protesting Britain's lack of support for Spain; my mother canvassing long before those events for the League of Nations Union ; and all three of them working on behalf of German and Austrian refugees from 1933 onwards.

View reference

qtd. in

Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 1985.

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She herself began (unknown to her family) selling the Communist Daily Worker door to door at only about eleven. She grew up to be a committed internationalist, anti-war, anti-nuclear, and environmentalist campaigner.

Together GA and five other women created a feminist anti-nuclear group they named Sister Seven .

She also hinted that he was the first man to show any interest in her and this, with shared tastes in film, music, and anti-nuclear politics, was enough.

In the 1960s SD took part in protests against nuclear arms.

In the 1980s MR took up the struggle against Cruise nuclear missiles, joining protests at Greenham Common and elsewhere. She is still a republican in politics as well as a feminist.

PDJ did two kinds of first-hand research for this novel: into law practice (months spent in The Old Bailey , on the phone to barristers, and having coffee with judges) and into the running of nuclear facilities (days with staff at Sizewell B to get an idea about work practice and the hierarchy of power). She seems to have enjoyed the contact with the judges most. The book was televised in 1991.

DL helped to organise the first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march to the nuclear facility at Aldermaston, which took place on 4-7 April.

This collection feels like a transitional work, between Levy's avant-garde theatre and her later prose fiction. A Little Treatise on Sex and Politics in the 1980s uses various contrasting type-faces and combines prose with verse, lists, dramatic dialogue. The Feminist Companion called the title story a witty and unnerving fable about the nuclear family and nuclear society.

When she was young, said ND in about 1965 (in the context of discussing anti-nuclear and anti-racist politics), she used to be the whole time going to political meetings and completely involved in politics. She then withdrew somewhat into personal life, with the result that she felt, what is one doing shutting oneself up in rooms writing books when there are plenty of books. Shouldn't one be out fighting for freedom?

Fay's maternal grandmother, whom she calls Frieda early in her autobiography but Nona from the time they became close, and who was called Susan by her husband, had modelled for Holman Hunt as a girl. She was a concert pianist, not yet twenty, when she married the middle-aged Edgar Jepson; though she gave up playing in public, she pracised for hours every day. She brought up three children, and then, when her husband left her for a woman he had got pregnant, went to live with her own mother, who had emigrated to California. After her mother died she joined her daughter in New Zealand in 1942, and became a member of the nuclear family for the rest of Fay's childhood.

During the 1980s RR was active in support both of the Labour Party and of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament . Later she was involved with Emily's List (founded in February 1993 with the aim of getting more Labour women into parliament) and Red Pepper: Green Socialism, a monthly magazine launched in June 1994. After becoming a baroness in 1997, RR remained a socialist: it's not a fashionable word but I am very much of the Left. She felt, too, that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.

Pinter voted Tory in May 1979 (when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister) in reaction against trade union intransigence (which had threatened a play he was directing at the National Theatre ), and SDP in June 1983 in protest against Labour's hypocrisy over the issue of nuclear disarmament as well as against the Tories. He voted Labour in 1992 and 1997, during a decade when his work became more and more deeply concerned with politics and political oppression, but began to move away from the party over the issue of the atrocities in Kosovo (then in Yugoslavia), and NATO 's military action after talks failed in March 1999. He supported the cause of human rights with speeches, demonstrations, and appearances on TV, but he opposed the International Court of Justice at the Hague, feeling that it could dispense victors' justice only.

SK belonged to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament . She listed her politics in Contemporary Authors as surrealist.

She has been a feminist from the time that the women's movement began, and also a passionate campaigner against war, particularly nuclear war. She writes of these forces of destruction as a third parent / a godfather at every baby's christening from the time that she was born, unconscious of all this, during the second world war. For some years she was a regular on the Easter marches of CND to the nuclear research establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. She calls herself anti-militarist, anti-establishment, out to change society and reshape the role of women.