Berkowitz, E. Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West from the Ancients to Fake News, Westbourne Press, 2021, pp384, £20 (hb), 978-1908906427. Reviewed by Sean Sheehan A history of censorship is a history of the world and the author of Dangerous Ideas wisely adds the word ‘brief’ to his book’s subtitle. That […]
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 […]
Judy Cox, Rebellious Daughters of History, 2021, Redwords, 9781912926947, £10, pp128 Reviewed by Lorna McKinnon Where can we look to see the seedlings of the ideas we hold today in terms of the struggle for women’s liberation, for the liberation of all, for the abolition of slavery, and for an end to the atrocities of […]
Maggie Chetty recalls the life of Skinnider and the work to keep her memory alive. From the great political ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century emerged a raft of revolutionaries across Europe. Within that ferment were the seeds of revolution in Scotland, Ireland, Russia, Germany and a catastrophic World War. The […]
On the occasion of the beginning of the 50th anniversary in 2021 of the UCS work-in, we reprint a book review by Gordon Morgan from Scottish Left Review (no 67, Nov/Dec 2011). Betteridge, D. (ed.) A Rose Loupt Oot – Poetry and Song Celebrating the UCS Work-in, Smokestack Books, 2011 978-0956417503, £8.95. Oor faithers fought […]
Ben Jackson, The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland, Cambridge University Press, pp179, £18.99, 9781108883733 Reviewed by Colin Fox. The intellectual case for Scottish Independence and how it evolved over the past 50 years is the subject of this new book from Cambridge University Press. It claims somewhat […]
Victor Serge, Notebooks: 1936-1947, New York Review Books, 2019, £14, pp651, 9781681372709 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan. No one writing from personal experience has expressed more political joy for the achievement of the 1917 Russian Revolution and elegiac regret for its aftermath than Victor Serge. Born in Belgium to impoverished Russian exiles, it was in Paris […]