Mo Mowlam, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland until 1999, is arguably Britain's most popular politician and a woman who evokes immense personal empathy among politicians and, more importantly, the public at large. She has given political journalist Julia Langdon privileged access to her family, friends and colleagues to enable her to write a definitive account of an absorbing life - the child of alcoholic parents who was the first in the family to go to university; studying in the USA; a politics lecturer who was also a woman with a mission to do something; her sexual liberation in the Seventies; her Labour politics in the North East, Westminster and of course Ulster; and her dramatic success achieved against a brain tumour.