Patrick Phillips looks at the social aspects of anthropology and architecture of a lost village in Scotland. On maps today, ruins are simply known as shielings. Without roofs, they cannot be considered as bothies either. A shieling is defined as ‘a mountain hut used as a shelter by shepherds‘, or from another perspective, ‘a summer […]
Kevin Macdonald, director, The Mauritanian, 2021 (with writers: Rory Haines, Michael Bronner and Sohrab Noshirvani) Reviewed by Jackie Bergson. The Mauritanian is based upon the testimonies of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who, suspected of terrorism, was arrested by Mauritanian police in November 2001. Consequently, he was questioned by the FBI, then imprisoned in solitary confinement in […]
Ralph Guentzel, The Quest for a Feasible Utopia: Historical variants of democratic socialism and their contemporary implications, Nomos, 2022, pp238 Reviewed by Dexter Govan. With a bleak winter approaching, it can be difficult to imagine a bright future. And yet, for centuries through grim times as well as prosperous ones, socialists have theorised about what […]
’Mon the Workers’. Celebrating 125 Years of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, ed. Daniel Gray with photography by Alan McCredie, Luath Press Edinburgh, 2022, pp271, 978-1-80425-033-4 Reviewed by Jenni Gunn ‘Mon the Workers hascome at an important flash point for the workers movement. ‘Hot Strike Summer’ is leading into the new ‘Winter of Discontent’ as […]
Catherine Flynn (ed.) The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes, Cambridge, 2022, £30, pp988, 9781316515945 and Sam Slote, Marc Mamigonian and John Turner, Annotations to James Joyce’s Ulysses, Oxford, 2022, £125, pp1424, 0198864582 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan. A hundred years have passed since Sylvia Beach, the owner of the Shakespeare and […]
Roger Seifert, UNITE History Volume 2 (1932-1945): The Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU): No Turning Back: The Road to War and Welfare, Liverpool University Press, 2022, ppxii+165, £6.99 (e-book), 9781802076981. Reviewed by Dave Sherry 2022 marks the centenary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union – a predecessor and constituent part of UNITE, Britain […]
Eileen Turnbull, A Very British Conspiracy – The Shrewsbury 24 and the Campaign for Justice, Verso, 2022, £16.99, pp384, 9781804290149 Reviewed by Stephen Smellie Every now and then you read a book that you immediately want to tell other people about, that you believe is important and that what you have learned from reading it […]
A week is a long time in politics, as the old cliche goes. We never know what could be just around the corner, and I have very bad form in that regard. My previous two columns in July and September have failed to predict Boris Johnson’s resignation and the death of the Queen. Thankfully, Liz […]
After BoJo’s long but often AWOL goodbye since resigning on 7 July 2022, you still need to pinch yourself to recognise that current favourite, Liz Truss, is going to be an even more right-wing PM than Johnson was. The Tory leadership contest that led to her election highlights a number of drastic deficiencies in our […]
In Scottish Left Review (Jul/Aug 2022), George Kerevan bemoaned what he sees as increased working-class support for the SNP in the 2022 Scottish council elections stating: ‘With the avowed anti-capitalist parties remaining miniscule and irrelevant, what alternative did the working-class have?’ Kerevan criticised the election campaign and the ‘negligible’ votes of the Scottish Trade Unionist […]