Review: Stasi Child, by David Young
I’m probably wrong about this, but I think the trend of writing police procedurals set in totalitarian societies started with Martin Cruz Smith, whose Gorky Park was published back in 1981. Since then there have…
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Starmer, Biden and the picket line
The distinction often made by socialists between “liberal parties” and “labour parties” has been undermined somewhat by recent developments on both sides of the Atlantic. Here in the U.K., much has been of Labour leader…
Review: Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, by Andreas Malm
This short book is a brilliant book. Many of the books I read are quite predictable, and that is one of the reasons why I read them. If I read a thriller or crime fiction,…
Georgia and the Russian Civil War: A reply to Paul Vernadsky
This letter to the editor of Solidarity was published in the 27 July 2022 issue of the newspaper. I have not yet read Antony Beevor’s new book on the Russian revolution and civil war so…
The Totalitarians at Tolpuddle
This year I attended the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in Dorset for the very first time. It was on the bucket list for a Canadian friend and as I’d never been before, I thought – why…
Review: Nobody Walks, by Mick Herron
On page 74 of this book, a character is described as “a Service legend, in her way. Not a bona fide legend like your Jackson Lambs – the plural uncalled for, because there was only…
Review: X Troop – The Secret Jewish Commandos Who Helped Defeat the Nazis, by Leah Garrett
One reviewer described this book as “‘Inglorious Basterds’ but much better”. I don’t buy that at all. This is not, in any sense, based upon or linked to Tarantino’s brilliant film. Instead, it’s the true…
Review: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, by Karl Kautsky
I am of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it hasn’t stood the test of time. Kautsky’s predictions from 1918 about what was going to happen next in Soviet Russia turned out…
Review: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, by Harald Jähner
This is a long, detailed and quite interesting account of the first years of Germany following the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945. But it is not comprehensive. There are many topics that Jähner has…
Review: Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
This is one the great works of anti-Stalinist literature. It is an attempt by the ex-Communist Koestler to imagine how Soviet interrogators squeezed confessions out of men like Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin — men who…