The year 2019 saw the long overdue publication in English of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, its Russian original having been published in the Soviet Union in 1952 (albeit in censored form).1 Its appearance is particularly welcome to the English-speaking reader because… Continue Reading
When the manuscript of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four landed on his desk in late 1948, writes a biographer, his publisher fired off an internal memorandum stating that it “represented ‘a deliberate and sadistic attack on socialism and socialist parties generally’.… Continue Reading
A review of Julian Markels, The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature (Monthly Review Press, 2003), £15 Julian Markels’ book participates in a long-standing debate about the relationship between Marxism, class and literature. It sets itself apart, however, from many… Continue Reading
A review of Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill, Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), £55 This is an exemplary book which does exactly what it says on the tin, examining how the 1926 General… Continue Reading
In the 1916 novel Under Fire: The Story of a Squad, Henri Barbusse vividly describes the experience of the First World War.1 By means of this book, which won the Prix Goncourt the same year, Barbusse, a French writer and… Continue Reading