The most recent New Left Review (II/86) starts off with an editorial that approaches the Ukraine crisis calmly and rationally. While exposing the hypocrisy of Western denunciations of the Russian annexation of Crimea, Susan Watkins stresses that the US stumbled… Continue Reading
Robin Bunce and Paul Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography, (Bloomsbury, 2014), £54.99 This fascinating political biography of Darcus Howe will teach even the most knowledgeable of students of Caribbean history and the struggles of the diaspora many valuable lessons.… Continue Reading
Paulo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets (Pluto Press, 2012), £15 Are social media a substitute for a revolutionary paper? Is the social network a substitute for a revolutionary party? These are some of the questions Paulo Gerbaudo attempts to answer.… Continue Reading
Xiaming Li, Education in China: Cultural Influences, Global Perspectives and Social Challenges (Nova, 2013), £124, and Holly H Ming, The Education of Migrant Children and China’s Future (Routledge, 2013), £85 Chinese education has become a hot topic in the UK.… Continue Reading
Richard House (ed), Too Much, Too Soon: Early Learning and the Erosion of Childhood (Hawthorn Press, 2011), £20 In April this year Ofsted Chief Inspector Michael Wilshaw announced that from September 2015 four year olds will be tested within the… Continue Reading
Dave Hann, Physical Resistance: A Hundred Years of Anti–fascism (Zero, 2013), £18.99 There is much to recommend in this work, prepared for publication following Dave Hann’s untimely death from cancer by his partner, who, like Dave did, still leads from… Continue Reading
Lindsey German, How a Century of War Changed the Lives of Women (Pluto Press, 2013), £14 Lindsey German describes her book How a Century of War Changed the Lives of Women as “an attempt to understand the relationship between women… Continue Reading
Sabby Sagall, Final Solutions: Human Nature, Capitalism and Genocide (Pluto Press, 2013), £20.50 In Final Solutions Sabby Sagall analyses the nature and the role of the subjective and irrational in determining genocidal mass murder. The book poses the question as… Continue Reading
The Russian Revolution unleashed a vicious struggle between revolutionaries (above all the Bolsheviks based among the miners of the Donbass in the east), Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, and red and white armies. This sentence in Alex Callinicos’s analysis of events… Continue Reading
A review of Robert Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel (Oxford University Press, 2013), £25 At one point in his new study of George Orwell, Robert Colls, Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, insists that he is not trying… Continue Reading