This month is the centennial of the modern hunger strike. Here is an appreciation of Marion Wallace-Dunlop, who engineered the hunger strike as a modern political tactic in 1909. (Gandhi came to London and met her that year, nine years before his first hunger strike; Irish leaders met her then too, four years before they began hunger-striking.) What is sort of obscured by the haze of recent history is just how crazy and violent the fight for equal rights was back then-when a bunch of ladies spent their days breaking windows, committing graffiti and actually physically attacking police officers and Ministers of Cabinet who would go on to be Prime Ministers. READ MORE