Magazine Issues

sw2358.jpg
Issue - 441

What has ~MeToo achieved so far

Sign up for our daily email update ‘Breakfast in Red’

In this issue

Socialist Review Archive

Pick of the year

Our writers’ cultural and literary highlights of 2018
28 November 2018
Reviews & Culture

Five things to do or see this month

Ordinary Giants: A Life and Times 1918–2018by Robb Johnson, out now on CDOrdinary Giants is a song suite by Robb Johnson about the life and times of his father, Ron Johnson, who served in the Second World War. It follows his acclaimed 1997 album Gentle Men, which looked at his grandfathers and the First World...
28 November 2018
Reviews & Culture

The Last Days of Mankind

The Last Days of Mankind, by the Austrian journalist and satirist Karl Kraus, is a neglected classic of modern European theatre. Written throughout and immediately after the First World War, this extraordinary five-act play is an inventive and impassioned response to the slaughter. Leith Theatre in Edinburgh, an early 20th-century playhouse which has been reopened...
28 November 2018
Reviews & Culture

Martin Parr: Return to Manchester

Almost 50 years ago, the teenage Martin Parr came up north to Manchester Polytechnic where he learnt his trade as a photographer, shooting in black and white. He looked for people, often managing to get close to them. He hung out in the city centre, Piccadilly Gardens, where he found young couples and fans of...
28 November 2018
Reviews & Culture

Sorry to Bother You

Last August Boots Riley, the American rapper and activist, caused controversy by launching a blistering attack on Spike Lee’s blockbusting film BlacKKKlansman. Riley’s criticism revolved around whether police officers should be portrayed as allies in the fight against racism. For Riley, Ron Stallworth (BlacKKKlansman’s protagonist) “is the villain”. Sorry to Bother You, Riley’s big screen...
28 November 2018
Disobedience
Reviews & Culture

Disobedience

Disobedience is Chilean director Sebastian Lelio’s first English language film, a north-west London-set drama, based on the 2006 novel by Naomi Alderman. Compared to his previous film, 2017’s A Fantastic Woman, this is a downbeat, subtle story of two women who grew up in an orthodox Jewish community. Ronit (Rachel Weisz) returns to London from...
28 November 2018
Reviews & Culture

22 July and Utoya – July 22

On 22 July 2011 a Norwegian neo-Nazi stunned the world with his cold-blooded slaughter of 77 people. Another 242 were seriously injured, many permanently disabled. Most victims were members of the Norwegian Labour Party at a Workers Youth League camp on the tiny island of Utoya. Eight of the deaths plus most casualties were caused...
28 November 2018
Reviews & Culture

A woman who created and recorded history

A fascinating new exhibition in east London shows the work of suffragette and photographer Norah Smyth. The images, mostly taken from 1914 to 1916, record the work of the East London Federation of Suffragettes. They are on loan from the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam and are displayed together for the first time. Smyth’s...
28 November 2018
News Image
Reviews & Culture

Algiers, Third World Capital

Elaine Mokhtefi arrives in Paris in 1951. Over the following decades she gives her all to facilitate the movement for Algerian Independence, on the way mingling with the best — and worst — political figures of the time. Mokhtefi ascribes her political awakening to May Day 1952 when she witnesses a huge protest and is...
28 November 2018
Reviews & Culture

Freedom

Nathaniel lives in Jamaica and doesn’t want to move to England with his master’s family, leaving his mother and sister behind on the Jamaican plantation. But his mother has told him: “once a slave sets foot on English soil, they’re free”. Perhaps he can earn his fortune and buy his family’s freedom, too. What would...
28 November 2018
News Image
Reviews & Culture

Flawed Capitalism

I first met David Coates in the York branch of the International Socialists in September 1971. So it is with great sadness that I learned that he died on 7 August this year. There are two sides to the way Coates presents capitalism as flawed: the impact that it has had on the mass of...
28 November 2018
News Image
Reviews & Culture

Economics for the Many

This collection of essays begins with the undoubted instability and polarisation neoliberalism has caused. It ends with Guy Standing claiming vindication for his 2011 prediction that a political monster would emerge. In between there is much useful detail about the systemic theft at the heart of the current system and well-argued proposals for alternatives. Antonia...
28 November 2018