The 80s David McKinstry The Keegan perm gave way to the mullet And CD replaced LP, Whilst Essex boys whistled ‘Maggie’s the girl for me’. Unemployment was rising Whilst the Belgrano was sinking, We were told to consume Without conscience or thinking. The nation watched Royal wedding at St. Pauls’, Whilst we prayed in our […]
Steve McQueen, director, Small Axe: Mangrove (2020) Reviewed by Jackie Bergson. Artistry and realism synergise perfectly within screenwriter and director, Steve McQueen’s, body of work, much of which includes historical drama films which have been inspired by real people and events. This is also true of his recently released Small Axe anthology of five films; […]
Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689-1939, Routledge, 2020, pp670, £29.99 (pb), 9780367432362. Reviewed by Sean Sheehan. In Britain, collusion between Classics and class is portrayed in terms of a privileged few brandishing their acquaintance with Greek and Latin as an emblem of […]
Trevor Royle, Facing the Bear: Scotland and the Cold War, Birlinn, 2019, £25, pp368, 9781780275260 Reviewed by Hamish Kirk. I grew up in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s not far from the Rosyth naval base. Awareness of the danger of nuclear war between the superpowers led me to CND and some token activism. I […]
Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, 4th Estate, 2020, £30, pp769, 9780007319053 Reviewed by Graeme Arnott. Readers will be more than familiar with the whole panoply of political ‘-isms’ that range from those of collective struggle to those named after specific individuals. The same is rarely true for artists, or […]
Gavin Esler, How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations, Head of Zeus, 2021, £9.99, 9781800241053 Reviewed by Andrew Noble. Born in a Clydebank council house, Esler is the descendant of Protestant refugees from Germany during the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. Further, in 1912 six of his Ulster relatives living in […]
The Red Paper Reviewed by Vince Mills. In the latest issue of the Red Paper, it is argued that the Scottish Parliament has fallen far short of the kind of parliament we need in these days of footloose, vampire capitalism. The current, dire state of the Scottish economy and the need for a radical strategy […]
As spring arrives and we slowly emerge from the winter lockdown, we appear to have entered some bizarre parallel universe where Dominic Cummings preaches about honesty, integrity and ethics; where Alex Salmond pledges to ‘put women front and centre’ of his party’s policies; and where Gordon Brown warns ‘Project Fear won’t work’. I suppose it’s […]
This issue is our traditional STUC congress themed issue. In it, and in addition to hearing from the STUC itself, we ask the union affiliates of our sister organisation, the Jimmy Reid Foundation, to consider five questions a year after the pandemic began and as we head into the 6 May Scottish Parliament elections. The […]
Roz Foyer outlines the STUC agenda for the coming period and how it is working to gain these goals. Across Scotland there are thousands of workers’ families, retired workers’ friends and communities who are carrying the pain of loss of their loved ones. The shocking statistic of over 100,000 COVID-19 related deaths is an indictment […]