Magazine Issues

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Issue - 442

The war on trans

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In this issue

Monsters and Men
Reviews & Culture

Monsters and Men

American cinema’s appetite for themes of race and class shows no sign of abating. This latest contribution from debut writer and director Reinaldo Marcus Green comes in a series of increasingly class-conscious movies. Monsters and Men’s raw aesthetic and unapologetically direct style, stripped of the self-conscious pretensions of some of its predecessors, reinvents social realism...
23 January 2019
Socialist Review Archive

Continuity and change in the Labour Party

First published in 1988, Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein's The Labour Party: A Marxist History was indispensible to those trying to understand the power and limitations of reformism. Charlie Kimber explains why he has contributed to an updated edition covering the period from Blair to Corbyn.
04 January 2019
Reviews & Culture

In defence of degenerate art

The so called “alt-right” project is an attempt to throw an ideological blanket over a range of deeply reactionary political tendencies. These range from racist right wing “mainstream” conservatives (such as Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg in Britain), to far-right populists (like US president Donald Trump and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán) and outright fascists...
04 January 2019
Reviews & Culture

Five things to do or see this month

Who Will Write Our HistoryLearning from the Righteous, High Barnet, London, 27 JanuaryThe story of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, the secret archive he created and led in the Warsaw Ghetto. With 30,000 pages of writing, photographs, posters, and more, the Oyneg Shabes Archive is the most important cache of in-the-moment, eyewitness accounts...
04 January 2019
Reviews & Culture

Roma

Yalitza Aparicio. Remember her name. As an amateur debutante she plays Cleo in Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film Roma. It’s a semi-autobiographical tale of upstairs/downstairs life in his native Mexico City, set in 1971 when he would have been ten. Cleo is one of two live-in workers for the middle class family whose male doctor head...
04 January 2019
Reviews & Culture

Fernand Leger: New Times, New Pleasures

Tate Liverpool is currently hosting a major exhibition of the work of Fernand Léger. Léger (1881–1955) is one of the 20th century’s great modernist artists. He worked in a diverse range of media which the exhibition successfully brings together with abstract and figurative paintings, a large-scale mural, films, graphic designs, drawings, books and textiles. Born...
04 January 2019
Reviews & Culture

Drill music and social exclusion

If you type the words “Incognito blessed” into your preferred internet search engine it will bring up a very poignant three-minute drill music video set in and around the Brandon Estate in south London. One of its six tower blocks, Molesworth House, is prominently featured in the film but the area is not just a...
04 January 2019
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Reviews & Culture

Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England

Once upon a time there was an enchanted land called Labour England which had “at its heart the idea of social, public and cooperative ownership as part of a mixed economy”. This Wonderland had been created by a great wizard, Clement Attlee, who had “changed the world”. He had introduced the NHS, a massive house-building...
04 January 2019
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Reviews & Culture

Don’t Stop the Carnival: Black British Music

This ambitious odyssey traces the start of black music in the UK from the 11th century onwards. From the point when knights return from the crusades with African instruments (such as the oud and tabour) Le Gendre takes us on an epic journey of triumph over prejudice culminating in the ubiquity of black and black-influenced...
04 January 2019
Reviews & Culture

Reporting the Troubles

The period in the history of Northern Ireland that has become known as “The Troubles” spanned three decades and saw the loss of over 3,600 lives. More than 2,000 of these were civilians and all this in an area that contained less than 2 million people. This book is an attempt to tell some of...
04 January 2019
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Reviews & Culture

Art for All

In Art for All Christine Lindey considers socially committed art and artists across three periods — 1914–39, 1939–45 and 1945–62. In her introduction she explains the use of the term: “‘Socially committed’ suggests an active engagement with social change…[and] allowing the flexibility needed for the consideration of a wide gamut of works ranging from paintings...
04 January 2019
Reviews & Culture

Stories of Solidarity

In the chapter “The Secret World of the South Wales Miner”, Hywel Francis makes a strong case for the relevance of oral history when exploring the development of the working class in South Wales. By using it in this collection of essays, he uncovers some inspiring but often neglected Valleys history from the last century,...
04 January 2019