In 2013, Julie Burchill wrote a mischievous piece in the Observer to defend her friend Suzanne Moore. Burchill had not anticipated the vitriolic reaction that her words would provoke. She was pursued by the outrage mob, and there were even calls in the British House of Commons for her to be fired from her job. After that, Burchill – now known as "the dark star of Fleet Street" – was lucky to be to writing online blog pieces.

Welcome to the Woke Trials is partmemoir and partindictment of what happened to Julie Burchill between then and now, as the regiments of the woke took over journalism. It is also a characteristically irreverent and entertaining analysis of the key elements of a continuing and disturbing phenomenon – all told with the common touch and rampant vulgarity that has made Burchill a household name.

Raised in a communist household and a lifelong Labour Party voter, Burchill also makes the case for a progressive future politics, a time when we see ourselves as a common humanity with similar hopes and dreams rather than a childish world of villains and victims. As she argues, the day we awake from our sleepwalking cannot come too soon.

Julie Burchill is a British journalist, columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, and author of Unchosen: The Memoirs of a PhiloSemite and Not in My Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy.