I was alerted to this book by an interview with its author carried out by Mick Hume, ‘editor-at-large’ of Spiked, the conservative libertarian website. Mick is something of a friend of Roger Scruton and remains dazzled by the great man’s [...]
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Given the demise of the BNP and its splinters, as well as the decline and internecine warfare in the English Defence League and its cousins, we might think that fascism is not a big issue. However, if we look across [...]
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The Last Poets – Band on the Wall 21/07/15 The Last Poets have long been regarded as the forefathers of Hip Hop. After forming on Malcolm X’s birthday in 1968, they became the credible soundtrack to the burgeoning Black Power movement [...]
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Light shining in Buckinghamshire, a play by Caryl Churchill is set at the time of the Civil War in 17th century England, when the world was turned upside down as people fought for a different way to live and to put [...]
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Peter Kennard: Unofficial War Artist at the Imperial War Museum, London, until 30 May 2016. Most people who have been active politically on the left will be familiar with the striking simple graphics and photomontage of Peter Kennard. They have featured [...]
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Yossi is a love story about escape from loss and loneliness. The tension in this film is carried, almost exclusively, by Dr Yossi Gutmann (Ohad Knoller), a hirsute, thick-bodied man on the verge of fatness. He is 34, single, vulnerable to [...]
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Having faced outrageous neglect in the hands of the British art establishment before and after his death in 1987, Renato Guttuso: Painter of Modern Life at the Estorick Collection in London is a welcome retrospective of a fascinating figure of [...]
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Based on the book "The Gangs of Manchester" by Andrew Davies the play describes the Scuttler gang phenomenon of late Victorian Ancoats in Manchester. The area of Ancoats - on the fringes of Manchester's city centre - described by its 21st [...]
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At 464 pages you might decide to pass on reading The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. This would be a mistake. This is a gargantuan work but easily digestible in parts with each chapter standing on its own [...]
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BOOK REVIEW: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BY ERIC HAZAN (Verso 2014) Books on the French Revolution would fill a large library, and the history of histories of the Revolution is a fascinating subject in its own right. But in the end, all [...]
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