“False Memory Syndrome” sounds like a real thing, and it is. It is also the starting point for this outstanding thriller which is part time travel, part love story. It is a book, above all,…Read more…

Paul Kellogg and Mariya Melentyeva have performed an important service by bringing this long-forgotten work by the most famous of the Mensheviks back into print. Their new translation and Kellogg’s introduction are excellent; the book…Read more…

The third (and final, for now) book in the new British crime series featuring Camden mortuary worker Cassie Raven is keeping up the high standard set by the previous two stories. The fact that I…Read more…

The second book in the Cassie Raven series is as good as the first. This time, the Camden-based mortuary worker investigates a cold case even closer to home: her father, jailed for murdering her mother…Read more…

This short book is a wonderful resource for writers — both writers of fiction and non-fiction. Unlike so many books about writing, this is not about self-publishing, or setting goals, or grammar, or marketing. Instead,…Read more…

Cassie (Cassandra) Raven works in a mortuary in Camden, north London, where she speaks to the dead — and it seems they might be speaking back. This is the first book in a series of…Read more…

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in the first days of November 1917, socialists everywhere greeted the news with delight. But not Karl Kautsky, the German Social Democrat then widely known as…Read more…

I love a good, fast-paced thriller and this book showed a lot of promise. In the opening few pages, the heroine — a woman known as “Jack” — returns home from a dangerous assignment (she…Read more…

With those four men listed as the authors, how could this have been such an uninteresting book? It’s the transcript of a debate which took place in Toronto several years ago. Pinker and Ridley made…Read more…

Growing up in the Soviet Union, Masha Karp read George Orwell’s novels, and in particular 1984 and Animal Farm and could not understand something. How could someone who never lived in her country, who did…Read more…

This is an example of a book with a very good title, but little else. The author appears to have done hardly any research, mostly tells you stuff any writer would know, and the good…Read more…

Don’t be put off by the silly title. “Orgasmatron” was an inside joke in Woody Allen’s 1973 film “Sleeper”. And no, Wilhelm Reich did not invent sex (as far as I know). But title aside,…Read more…

This very short book is unfortunately not a very good book. If you want to know what Freud thought about things, probably the best place to start is Freud himself. Author Anthony Storr concedes that…Read more…

Remember a time when the CIA was seen as either the bad guys or at best morally complicated? Back in the Seventies, post-Watergate, if the CIA put in an appearance in a book or film,…Read more…

This is effectively two long articles combined in one small book, and re-reading it after many years, I can now understand it in a different light than before. Rosa Luxemburg has been claimed by many…Read more…

A very good introduction — in graphic novel format — to the life and work of Wilhelm Reich, a brilliant psychoanalyst and a man who attempted to reconcile the teachings of Freud and Marx. His…Read more…

In 1920, when this book first appeared, there were not very many critics of the new Soviet government on the Left (outside of Russia). Anarchists including Emma Goldman visited Russia and came away disenchanted. Rosa…Read more…

As the Second World War was coming to an end, anti-Stalinists on the Left found themselves facing a difficult problem. The Soviet Union had won a resounding victory against Nazi Germany. Stalin was widely perceived,…Read more…

Write shorter sentences. Use one syllable words where possible. That’s the message of this short book, which is padded with lots of empty space, some forgettable graphics and endless advertising for the authors’ software which…Read more…

If you’ve seen the movies ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ and ‘Groundhog Day’ you’ve got the plot of Replay. The novel begins with the death of 43-year-old Jeff Winston — who immediately re-awakens a quarter century…Read more…