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