A little more than 85 years ago, on 28 March 1939, the Spanish civil war ended. The fascist forces under the command of General Franco entered the capital, Madrid, and it was all over. Spain…

While there have been countless books and articles about V.I. Lenin, whose death in 1924 has been marked in this newspaper and elsewhere, there are some Russian revolutionaries of that time who have long been…

Something strange is happening in American and British politics this year. According to a report in this week’s Sunday Times, the Labour Party under the leadership of Keir Starmer seems on course not just to…

The 3,700 female workers in the Mahalla textile factories were furious. The Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, had earlier in the month raised the minimum wage to 6,000 Egyptian pounds — the equivalent of just…

For sixty years, the Anti-Defamation League has been profiling Americans to try to monitor antisemitic beliefs. For the first half century of doing that, they found a fairly steady and ongoing decline in anti-Jewish sentiment….

Dorothy Arzner is someone I had never heard of before, and maybe you haven’t either. Arzner was the only director of films in Hollywood under the studio system of the 1930s and 1940s and she…

When I studied at university, I had access to reprinted editions of many American left publications. Among them was Labor Action, the weekly newspaper of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party. I have never forgotten the headline…

One of the great speeches in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” is made by Robert Duvall, playing a somewhat insane U.S. Army colonel in Vietnam. After delivering his oft-quoted “I love the smell of napalm…

Keke would have been so proud. When her son Joseph was growing up in the small, dusty town of Gori, she dreamed that one day he would be a priest. He did eventually study at…

Colman Domingo has just been nominated to win an Oscar for best actor. I hope he wins — and not just because he did an excellent job playing American civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in…