What I liked most about this book was that the authors raise questions without answering them. Instead of asserting, as so many books of this type do, that (fill in name here) conspired to kill…Read more…
Review: The Case of Rudolf Hess – A Problem in Diagnosis and Forensic Psychiatry, edited by J.R. Rees
Imagine if at the height of the Second World War psychiatrists had the opportunity to pluck one of the Nazi leaders out of Germany and subject him to years of close observation. Imagine what we…Read more…
Review: The Manchurian Candidate, by Greil Marcus
I first came across Greil Marcus as someone who wrote about popular music — with a particular interest in Bob Dylan. It turns out that he has written about many aspects of American culture…Read more…
Review: The Manchurian Candidate, by Richard Condon
The Manchurian Candidate tells a completely implausible story – or does it? Following his capture by Soviet troops during the Korean War, a U.S. soldier named Raymond Shaw is brainwashed and…Read more…
Why I rejoined the Labour Party
I have just re-joined the Labour Party. Some people will say that one should never leave the Labour Party. Whatever it did, whatever bothered you and made it difficult to remain a member, you…Read more…
Review: The Socialist Awakening – What’s Different Now About the Left, by John B. Judis
In 2002, John Judis wrote a book predicting a new Democratic majority. It was his riposte to Kevin Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) which correctly predicted a quarter century…Read more…
Review: Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household
In 1939, British writer Geoffrey Household imagined how a lone sniper might attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler at his Bavarian vacation home near Berchtesgaden. Two years later, anti-Nazi German…Read more…
Belarus: The issue is working class solidarity – not “imperialism”
A few days ago, following up on a suggestion I made to LabourStart’s mailing list that people try out the secure messaging app Telegram, I received an interesting question. I had mentioned that…Read more…
Review: The All True Adventures and Rare Education of the Daredevil Daniel Bones, by Owen Booth
First of all, this is a terrific book. It is, in one sense, a coming-of-age story, but it is so much more. At the heart of the story is the eponymous Daniel whose life changes…Read more…
Why American unions are backing Biden
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is “lamentable”, “utterly useless”, a “creep” and a “shit”. Those are not the words of Donald Trump, but they are all used in an article in this newspaper…Read more…
Review: The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, by Richard J. Evans
The German army would have won the First World War, except that it was “stabbed in the back” by Socialists and Communists. Hitler was convinced by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,…Read more…
The labour movement and the tragedy of Nagorno-Karabakh
The recent outbreak of fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan, seems like something out of another era. Turkey and Russia each support their own side. A century ago, the…Read more…
Review: Dress Rehearsal, by Quentin Reynolds
In August 1942, nearly two years before D-Day, Allied forces landed in France in large numbers. The Dieppe raid, which consisted mainly of Canadians, was considered a failure at the time. No…Read more…
Why socialists should not support Howie Hawkins
The golden age of the Socialist Party in the U.S. lasted about a decade. By 1912 the party’s vote peaked when Eugene Debs won 6%. It was downhill from there. After more than four decades…Read more…
Review: Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong, by Tim Spector
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Myth. Calories accurately measure how fattening a food is. Myth. All processed food is bad for us. Myth. And so on. Tim Spector has identified more…Read more…
Review: London Diary, by Quentin Reynolds
One thing I love about reading older books is that often they were intended to be read immediately, to change the way people thought, and were not aimed at posterity. This is that kind of…Read more…
U.S. unions warn Trump: Don’t even think about it
A few days ago, the president of the AFL-CIO (the US’s national trade union centre) issued a powerful statement. The federation “categorically rejects all threats to the peaceful transition of power”…Read more…
Review: Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble, by Antony Beevor
The 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes forest “had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west,” concludes Antony Beevor in this book. And “terrifying…Read more…
Ukraine: Miners’ protest goes underground
Hundreds of mine workers have spent weeks underground in a desperate attempt to win concessions from their employers in Ukraine. The protests began on 3 September at the Oktyabrskaya mine, where 29…Read more…
Review: Our Man in New York: The British Plot to Bring America into the Second World War, by Henry Hemming
Henry Hemming is a great story-teller — and this is a great story. In June 1940, during the ‘darkest hour’ in modern British history, when a German invasion of England seemed only…Read more…