Lesley Riddoch, Huts: a place beyond – how to end our exile from nature, Luath, 2020, £9.99 Reviewed by Hamish Kirk. Looking back upon the heady days of 2014, I remember Riddoch’s book, Blossom, which engendered some debate and discussion. I hope Huts will do the same. She asks: ‘Why are attitudes to using the […]
Lloyd, J. Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: The Great Mistake of Scottish Independence, Polity, 2020, £20, pp211, 1509542663 Reviewed by Colin Fox John Lloyd is a contributing editor for the Financial Times and describes himself as a ‘first generation British neo-con’. Born in Anstruther in 1946 and the son of a hairdresser, he went to […]
Thompson, E. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Merlin Press, 2020, pp642, 978-0-85036-680-8, £25 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan Those who cherish the notion that left-wing radicals, given time, will metamorphose into ultra-conservatives like themselves tend to be peeved by people like Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn for so obviously contradicting their mantra. If William Morris’s thought […]
Musto, M. (ed.) The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations, Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75, pp408, 9781316338902 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan The focus of this book is announced in the title, The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations, and its essays by 22 contributors are symptomatic of renewed interest in a thinker who […]
Gessen, M. Surviving Autocracy, Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, 2020, 978059318893, £21.45 In the allegedly free late 1960s, I completed my doctorate on the profound influence of Russian novelist, Dostoevsky, on the young Canadian-American writer, Saul Bellow. In retrospect, I now feel that, in part, the thesis was driven by a desire that this mutual level […]
Murray Armstrong The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820, Pluto Press, 2020, 9780745341330, pp228 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan The Fight for Scottish Democracy is a strictly historical account though it begins with a scene that would not be out of place in a lurid Victorian novel: two women in the dead of […]
Kenny MacAskill Radical Scotland: Uncovering Scotland’s Radical History – from the French Revolutionary era to the 1820 Rising, Biteback, 2020, 9781785905704, pp352 Reviewed by Gordon Leggate This year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the 1820 Radical Rising, a perhaps lesser known period in Scottish history. On 1 April, proclamations were posted across many towns […]
Shutting down and switching off Silicon Valley Wendy Liu’s ‘Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism (Repeater Books, 2020, £10.99) is an almost diary-like account of a young computer programmer’s slow disillusionment with the tech industry. This interview, conducted by Aidan Beatty, took place in early February 2020. It was edited down for […]
Whitfield, D. Public Alternative to the Privatisation of Life, Spokesman, 2019, £25, 978085124 8837, pp580 Reviewed by Stuart Fairweather Public Alternative to The Privatisation of Life is the shortened title of Whitfield’s latest book. The notion of the privatisation of life is dramatic in language and scope. This is appropriate given the enormity of the […]
McCarraher, E. How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, Harvard University Press, 2019, pp816, 9780674984615, £31.95 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan The Enchantments of Mammon is not so much a damming indictment of neo-liberalism – do we need another one when the truth is so ecologically obvious? – but of the religion-inspired cant that glossed it […]