Almost seven years ago – in October 2013 – the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU) came to LabourStart with a problem. The national government had given the union an ultimatum: either…Read more…
“Pathetic clowns, lousy Trotskyists”: The Left responds to a solidarity campaign with Belarus
A week ago, at the request of independent trade unions in Belarus and supported by global union federations, LabourStart launched a campaign demanding an end to state repression in that country. The…Read more…
Review: A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway wrote this short collection of vignettes during the very last years of his life. And because of that, they are the mature reflections of a great writer looking back at the beginning of…Read more…
Review: It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
I first read this book around 50 years ago and have read it several times since. When it was reissued in the late 1960s, the publisher touted it as being especially relevant to the political…Read more…
Review: Operation Foxley: The British Plan to Kill Hitler
This short book consists mainly of a long and very secret memorandum, illustrated with maps and photographs, prepared by the British in 1944. The document lays out a series of options for killing the…Read more…
Review: Cry Baby, by Mark Billingham
British crime writer Mark Billingham has written 16 novels in the DI Tom Thorne series, most of them set in North London in the present day, and all of them in sequential order — until…Read more…
Review: The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin’s Russia, by Jonathan Schneer
I first heard of the Lockhart Plot, as many others will have done, in the British television series from the 1980s, Reilly: Ace of Spies. That was a largely fictionalised version of the story, but…Read more…
Review: The Undiscovered Country, by Aidan McQuade
There is a sub-genre of crime fiction that is set in war-time. And most often the war is the Second World War. Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Robert Harris’ Fatherland and Philip Kerr’s…Read more…
Review: I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, by A.M. Gittlitz
This is a wonderful book. People will read it because J. Posadas and the Trotskyist sect he led for decades were, for want of a better phrase, completely bonkers. A proponent of UFOlogy,…Read more…
Review: Under Cover, by John Roy Carlson
Imagine for a moment that in America there are millions of people who don’t like foreigners or people of colour, who are often fundamentalist Christians, who label all their opponents…Read more…
Review: The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin
Rightly considered a classic, this short book was published in the year of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. We should have been able to read…Read more…
Review: Hitler’s Third Reich in 100 Objects, by Roger Moorhouse
The danger of a book like this one is that it could encourage the fetishistic collection of Nazi memorabilia. There is already a fairly large community of people who collect such things, and some…Read more…
Review: Hitler’s Hangmen: The Secret German Plot to Kill Churchill, December 1944, by Brian Lett
Brian Lett is the author of a number of excellent works of military history and I looked forward to this one, not least due to the intriguing title. Unfortunately, the title may be a bit…Read more…
Review: First to Fight – The Polish War 1939, by Roger Moorhouse
Here is what I think of when I imagine the German invasion of Poland in September 1939: brave Polish cavalrymen with sabres drawn, charging against modern German tanks. Horses versus steel. The…Read more…
Review: The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive, by Philippe Sands
This is history as it should be written. Philippe Sands has taken the story of one Nazi war criminal and turned it into a sprawling tale of love, family, truth, lies and memory. The story…Read more…
Review: The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive, by Philippe Sands
This is history as it should be written. Philippe Sands has taken the story of one Nazi war criminal and turned it into a sprawling tale of love, family, truth, lies and memory. The story…Read more…
Review: I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf, by Grant Snider
Grant Snider loves books. He loves to read them, to write them, to collect them, even to smell them. This wonderful collection of 1 – 2 page cartoons covers every aspect of reading and…Read more…
Review: I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf, by Grant Snider
Grant Snider loves books. He loves to read them, to write them, to collect them, even to smell them. This wonderful collection of 1 – 2 page cartoons covers every aspect of reading and…Read more…
Review: The Book of Tbilisi – A City in Short Fiction, edited by Gvantsa Jobava and Becca Parkinson
This short book of ten short stories about the Georgian capital can be read in an afternoon — and what a memorable afternoon that would be. These mostly young authors grew up in independent…Read more…
Review: The Book of Tbilisi – A City in Short Fiction, edited by Gvantsa Jobava and Becca Parkinson
This short book of ten short stories about the Georgian capital can be read in an afternoon — and what a memorable afternoon that would be. These mostly young authors grew up in independent…Read more…