SOURCE: "Cassandras at Camp," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4251, September 21, 1984, p. 1048.

Below, Ruthven reviews On the Perimeter, a nonfiction account of women campaigning against an American cruise missile base in England.

Caroline Blackwood first visited the Cruise missile protest camps at Greenham Common in March this year. Her curiosity had been aroused by the "loathsome and frightening" adjectives applied to the women peace campaigners in the newspapers. Auberon Waugh had said the women smelt of "fish paste and bad oysters". Other less gifted polemicists had described them as "screaming destructive witches", "sexstarved harpies" or just a "bunch of lesbians". They were accused of being in the pay of Moscow, or of being red spies who lived like dogs and smeared the town of Newbury with excrement.

In her partisan, but far from one-sided, account of the Greenham camps [On the Perimeter], Blackwood relates what she found out...