Magazine Issues

sw2351.jpg
Issue - 414

Damaging Times Ahead for the Tories

Splits over Europe are an opportunity

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

In this issue

Reviews & Culture

Comrade Corbyn

This book needs to be read, if it needs to be read at all, in the context of the general assault on the left as personified by Jeremy Corbyn. It comes at the more polite end of the scale of these attacks and uses condescension and damning with faint praise as its main weapons. Prince...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

Facing the Anthropocene

The idea that we are in the Anthropocene — a geological epoch defined by human activity — is now catching the interest of activists. It is becoming clear that human activity affects the Earth system in multiple, interconnected ways and potentially to such an extent as to be detectable in the geological record for years...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

The Senility of Vladimir P

This page-turning, vodka-sodden, tragi-comic crime thriller about political corruption and moral predicaments is a brilliant holiday read. It’s set in the future: Russia has been taken over by a new generation of despotic oligarchs, dissent is suppressed and former Russian president Vladimir P, now in an advanced stage of dementia, has been hived off to...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

The Racket

“A class war is being fought and the poor are losing.” Any book that acknowledges this harsh reality is worth a look. The author, a former Financial Times journalist, goes on to write about how the “countervailing powers, such as strong organised labor groups, that previously had some check on business power have been eroded...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

Against the Double Blackmail

A recent Radio 3 “Free Thinking” interview described Slavoj Žižek’s latest work as a “call to arms to imagine a new Europe”. If you read it expecting a manifesto for change, you will be disappointed. It contains the kind of thought-provoking ideas to be expected of an eminent professor. Unfortunately, they are buried in a...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

Marx and Human Nature

Norman’s Geras’s classic defence of human nature has been republished as part of Verso’s Radical Thinkers series. Geras wrote this tightly argued little book as a riposte to Louis Althusser’s idea of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s writing. Althusser contended that Marx had decisively broken with his earlier humanist theories based on alienation, instead moving...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

The Civilization of Perpetual Motion

Nomads are often dismissed or overlooked. Indeed, one relatively recent book declared that nomads “have had no major role in world history for the past 500 years”. Such views are often based on inaccurate and outdated views of nomads and their role in the modern world. Historically, nomads have been seen as backward and violent...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

Project Fear

Project fear is a fascinating insight into the characters and thought processes of those at the heart of the Better Together campaign against Scottish independence during the referendum and the fallout in the 2015 Westminster elections. The book is based on interviews with over 60 sources and filled with candid anecdotes showing the factionalism and...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

Respectable

The moment I read the first sentence of this book I knew I’d made a mistake agreeing to write a review of it. Determining class based upon whether you call dinner “tea” or “lunch” doesn’t bode well for a book which seeks to focus upon the nature of class in Britain today. Nevertheless, I’d agreed...
31 May 2016
News Image
Reviews & Culture

Teachers Undefeated

Jon Berry’s Teachers Undefeated: How Global Education Reform has Failed to Crush the Spirit of Educators is a great read for anyone who wants not only to know the problems with education but who also wants to be pointed towards a bit of hope for the future. Berry’s book begins by outlining the historic tensions...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

Punk: 1976-1978

“We are anti-racist and anti-fascist” claimed the Clash in their first interview with the then important music paper the NME. They explained that they had been at the riot at the Notting Hill Carnival that year (1976) and thought that “young white kids” needed to develop a culture of their own in order to fight...
31 May 2016
Reviews & Culture

Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms

The exhibition’s title refers to the boxes/cages in which Bacon confines his subjects. The viewers/voyeurs can see them; the subjects can only feel them confining them. The paintings are undeniably disturbing — only the unconscious or dead would not be disturbed. This is for me an advance on artworks which produce indifference or provoke ridicule....
31 May 2016