Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), £14.50 For all the thousands of books published on the Spanish Civil War, few studies of the conflict’s origins, course and consequences are as valuable and welcome as this current study.… Continue Reading
Robert Stuart, Marxism and National Identity (SUNY, 2006), $29.95 Today Jules Guesde is remembered, if at all, for the treachery at the end of his life—he joined the French wartime government in 1914 and remained in it till the end… Continue Reading
A review of Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare (Jonathan Cape, 2004); and James Shapiro, 1599: A year in the life of William Shakespeare (Faber, 2005) Two recent bestselling biographies of William Shakespeare have provided entertaining… Continue Reading
A review of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006), £12.99 If there is one book on nationalism that every student is expected to read, one book that is certain to be included… Continue Reading
Archie Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2007), £25 Archie Brown is credited with being the first person to advise Margaret Thatcher about the likely accession of Mikhail Gorbachev as a radical reformer… Continue Reading
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), £14.99 As its title insists, Archaeologies of the Future represents a self-conscious, and triumphantly self-confident, attempt to find traces of an alternative future that… Continue Reading
Jim House and Neil McMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory (Oxford University, 2006), £60 Leaving aside situations of insurrection, revolution or civil war, the massacre of Algerian demonstrators that took place from 17 to 20 October 1961 in… Continue Reading
Ramzy Baroud, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto, 2006), £15.99 The unique strength of Ramzy Baroud’s book lies in its masterful weaving of personal experience and feelings into a meticulous and powerful account of the… Continue Reading
Jamil Hilal (ed), Where now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution (Zed Books, 2007), £17.99 This collection of essays by a variety of academics is a significant development in the debate over the possibility of a “one_state” (or… Continue Reading
Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Zizek (eds), Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (Duke University, 2007), £12.99 “The name ‘Lenin’ is of urgent necessity for us precisely now, at a time when very few people seriously consider possible… Continue Reading