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literature

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth: a wild rebel soul

Posted on 17th April 2023 by International Socialism

For God’s sake, women, go out and play! Instead of staring round to see what wants polishing or rubbing, go out into the open and draw the breath of the moors or the hills into your lungs. Get some of… Continue Reading →

Article british socialism, literature

Ethel Mannin, women and the revolution

Posted on 10th January 2022 by International Socialism

In the closing pages of her Women and the Revolution, published in 1938, Ethel Mannin insisted that women faced a stark choice: The women of today must either ally themselves with freedom and life, or with oppression and death; either… Continue Reading →

Uncategorised Arts and culture, literature

Grossman’s Stalingrad

Posted on 23rd October 2021 by International Socialism

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 →

Uncategorised literature, Russia, Second World War

The secrets of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Posted on 1st July 2019 by Camilla

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 →

Article Culture, George Orwell, literature

Novel insights

Posted on 10th January 2017 by Camilla

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 →

Book reviews literature

Nine days that shaped the words

Posted on 22nd June 2016 by Camilla

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 →

Book reviews 1926 general strike, literature

Under Fire: A call for peace from the trenches

Posted on 22nd June 2016 by Camilla

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 →

Article First World War, literature
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