Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
The common cause
RICHARD MURGATROYD welcomes the modern relevance of a history of the expropriation of common lands for private profit
commons
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism
By Ian Angus
Monthly Review Press, New York, £18.99
A GOOD history book makes you think about the present.
On the day I finished Ian Angus’s The War Against the Commons I visited my local station ticket office. The queue was long and I had time to look around and reflect. Once all this great building, this marvel of engineering, this vital service, had been publicly owned, part of the modern “commons.” Even now in its privatised state there remained some good elements – like the expert and helpful staff in the ticket office which the train-lords and rentier bankers were planning to evict!
So, Angus’s book is timely indeed.
More from this author
RICHARD MURGATROYD is disappointed by an ambitious survey that fails to get to grips with the relationship between human consciousness and nature
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