Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered in the run-up to the US election was a sobering and resonant experience, says MARIA GOULDING. It’s a story centred on a dilapidated old house, a powerful image for an American society struggling to overcome its legacy of lies, injustice and inequality....
WILL BROWN reviews a fascinating and timely examination of the sources of anticolonial opinion in Britain, one that reinforces the importance of new and more honest accounts of Britain’s imperial past....
PAULINE BRYAN reviews a major new biography of Sylvia Pankhurst – suffragette, class warrior and tireless campaigner against racism, fascism and imperialism. ‘Her big life deserves such a big book.’...
Labour’s founder is often presented as old and sad at the state of the world. But, argues PAULINE BRYAN in the Introduction to her latest volume of essays, his main motivation wasn’t sadness, but anger....
MARIA GOULDING reflects on Ali Smith’s recently completed series of seasonal novels, an interwoven quartet written and published each year since the Brexit referendum. They are, she says, ‘both enjoyable and serious novels for our times’....
The “extraordinary life and career of Fenner Brockway” is due to be explored in a new blog on the long-time ILPer and anti-war campaigner, set up by Paul Simpson of the ‘Lives on the Left’ podcast and Hazel Kent of Bishop Grosseteste University....
The need for a co-operative response to the 2019 election result and the Covid-19 pandemic, community solutions to the housing crisis and reflections on the Peterloo massacre are just a few of the issues covered in the latest edition of The Sheffield Co-operator, published this month....
A new report from the Co-operative Party is calling for the post-pandemic economy to be built on equality, community ownership and a spirit of solidarity, rather than a return to division and austerity....
STEVE THOMPSON reviews the first ever biography of Labour’s former Cabinet minister and independent-minded MP, Peter Shore....
BARRY WINTER reviews Searching for Socialism by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, a valuable examination of the left’s ongoing struggle to transform the Labour Party....
For MARIA GOULDING, John Clare’s poetry is not only uplifting and restorative, but deeply relevant in our age of environmental uncertainty and social unease....
MARIA GOULDING reviews The Overstory by Richard Powers – probably ‘the best novel ever written about trees’, a tale with a compelling political message for our lockdown times. The characters and narrative are engrossing, and the big themes are of urgent contemporary relevance....