NICK MATTHEWS welcomes the return of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music to the repertoire of this years’ Three Choirs Festival
Breaking Badiou
MARTIN HALL steps gingerly through a work of French political theory, picking out the gems
Meeting of the Petrograd soviet in 1917
[Boris Kavashkin/RIA Novosti/CC] 
LEO BOIX reviews a caustic novel of resistance and womanhood by Buenos Aires-born Lucia Lijtmaer, and an electrifying poetry collection by Chilean Vicente Huidobro
MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
A New Dawn for Politics
Alain Badiou, Polity, £9.99
GIVEN that Alain Badiou said in 2009 that “from Plato onwards, communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher,” it is not surprising that this latest collection of essays and lectures covers familiar ground for his readers. Badiou has always remained faithful to the communist Idea (as he would write it), stating that “there is no other” for those who do not wish to accept Western liberal democracy as the only form of organising a mode of production.
However, what has crept in is a certain level of negativity regarding how that “Idea” might become concrete. It wasn’t always so.
In 2011, Badiou was confident enough to describe the Arab Spring as the “rebirth of history” and by the time of his 2016 book, Greece and the Reinvention of Politics, in an attempt to get beyond the “state-managerial construction” that he calls capitalo-parliamentarianism, he was proposing “the invention of a new political truth that both confronts the principal contradiction between capitalism and communism and... institutes and develops a new modernity.”
More from this author
MARTIN HALL passes time in the sanguine company of a traditional conservative, recalling their disastrous governments
As Starmer hints at closer ties, MARTIN HALL warns of the dangers of creeping alignment and calls for a renewed socialist case for independence from Brussels, especially over the EU’s constraints on economic planning
MARTIN HALL admires a remarkable film that concentrates on the human impact of gender dysphoria
Until such time as a new parliamentary vehicle for the working class emerges, socialists should continue to vote Labour, argues MARTIN HALL
