Magazine Issues

issue2349.txt
Issue - 409

Inter-Imperial Crash

Simon Assaf explains the crisis engulfing the Middle East

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In this issue

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Reviews & Culture

Number 11

Jonathan Coe has always been good at a comic “state of the nation” novel, as this sequel of sorts to his 1994 novel, What A Carve Up!, shows. Connecting the two books is the same Winshaw family, whose tentacles reach into the arms trade, food production and the media. Most were killed off in the...
05 January 2016
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Socialist Review Archive

Looking back with Pride

Nicola Field is working with independent LGBT+ publisher Dog Horn Publishing to bring out a new edition of her 1995 book Over the Rainbow. She talks to SR about why the book is needed now more than ever.
05 January 2016
Reviews & Culture

HITNRUN Phase Two

Unlike September’s poorly-received Phase One this surprise end-of-year release is a step away from digital production and back to the classic funky analogue sounds that Prince does so well. This is not an entirely new album. Some of the tracks have been released already and can be found for free online, some have been performed...
05 January 2016
Reviews & Culture

Art Angels

Pop music is political again. If it’s not that X Factor alumni Little Mix tweeted against the bombing of Syria, it’s that one of the most critically acclaimed records of the year is about climate change. Art Angels is Canadian Claire Boucher’s fourth studio album, and certainly her most ambitious to date. On this, her...
05 January 2016
Reviews & Culture

Deutschland 83

This eight-part spy thriller is said to be auguring a golden age for German TV — and it’s been a long time coming. The series will air on Channel 4 and is the first show to launch its video-on-demand service for “quality foreign television”, Walter Presents, a strand of the online platform All4. In recent...
05 January 2016
Reviews & Culture

Spotlight

It’s not that we aren’t aware of scandals and cover-ups around paedophilia and the Catholic church. And in Britain the Jimmy Savile scandal demonstrated that it isn’t only the Catholic church which is involved in the institutionalised covering-up of child abuse. The film Spotlight isn’t simply telling the story of yet more poor, working class...
05 January 2016
Reviews & Culture

The Danish Girl

The visibility of trans people has taken great leaps in the past couple of years. The release of The Danish Girl is well timed to continue that trend. Lili Elbe was born Einar Wegener in 1882. Einar became an award winning painter of rather restrained landscapes. She died aged 49, legally a woman, with a...
05 January 2016
Reviews & Culture

Artist and Empire

At first the idea of an exhibition of art relating to the British Empire sounds deeply off-putting. Is it a collection of images celebrating imperial conquest? While it does contain such paintings, Artist and Empire is doing something more complex and more interesting. Its opening room concentrates on the justification for empire. It contains many...
05 January 2016
Reviews & Culture

A brief history of seven Bob Marley songs

Marlon James’s wonderful novel A Brief History of Seven Killings was the worthy winner of last year’s Man Booker prize. It takes as its starting point a dramatic real life event — the attempted assassination of Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley in December 1976. Marley survived the attack, defiantly performing at the open air benefit...
05 January 2016
Reviews & Culture

Hungry Bengal

No socialist interested in South Asia and the British Empire should be without this myth-busting book. Meticulously researched and argued, Mukherjee focuses upon the Bengal famines of the 1940s and puts the blame for the millions of deaths upon three interrelated factors — British rule and the way India was dragged unwillingly into the Second...
05 January 2016
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Reviews & Culture

A History of the Barricade

This is an enthralling study of class struggle in France. It is littered with examples of ordinary people fighting back, whether it was during the French Revolution against absolutism, or in the Paris Commune. Working class people and the power they have to collectively change the world is the central theme of the book. Hazan...
05 January 2016
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Reviews & Culture

Separate and Dominate

In France the left has often defended secularism at the expense of defending Muslims against racism. Delphy, a feminist, anti-racist and important figure in the French anti-war movement, has been outspoken in her opposition to the headscarf ban and to the use of feminism for racist purposes. These essays from 2002 to 2006 give a...
05 January 2016