A review of Elaine Graham-Leigh, The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade (Boydell Press, 2005), £50 Readers of this journal may be familiar with Elaine Graham-Leigh as a Respect activist. Others will have heard her talk on medieval heresy… Continue Reading
A review of Tithi Bhattacharya, The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005). This is an important book that takes up one of the most significant developments in early modern Indian history—the… Continue Reading
A review of Hal Draper and E Haberkern, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume V: War and Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2005), $17.99 The attitudes the left take to imperialism are shaped more often than not by what they perceive… Continue Reading
A review of Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest (Seven Stories Press, 2005), $27.95 ‘The moment he uttered Ch’ansaemgol, Yosop realised that some 40 years had passed since he’d last mentioned the name of his hometown. Ch’ansaemgol. The word started out with… Continue Reading
A review of Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press, 2005), £13.99 This is a timely book. China is rarely out of the news, though generally in one of two contexts.… Continue Reading
A review of Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory (Brill, Historical Materialism book series, 2004), euro 52 This is an important book, though not an easy one. It is the second edition of a work… Continue Reading
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), £14.99 David Harvey, the leading Marxist geographer, manages to cram a lot into this brief history of the renaissance of free market capitalism in the guise of neoliberalism. He… Continue Reading
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939-2003) was one of the last of the engagé writers of Southern Europe, left wing intellectuals produced by the large Communist parties of the 1960s and 1970s. Prolific journalist, essayist and novelist, he was an outstanding interpreter… Continue Reading
Kevin Murphy’s book Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory is a landmark in the study of Soviet history.1 Based on painstaking research in four factory specific archives, it is, as the publisher claims, ‘unquestionably the most… Continue Reading
A review of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Untold Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005), £25 Chang and Halliday1 set out their agenda from the book’s opening words: ‘Mao Zedong, who for decades held absolute power over one quarter of… Continue Reading