MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Utopias: more than just myth
Limiting utopias to just ‘speculative myths’ denies their actual impact on historic living experience, believes HELEN MERCER
LIVING EXPERIENCE: Modernist housing estate on Grunwaldzki Square in Wroclaw, 1967-1975 by the multi-award winning architect Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
Utopia in the age of survival
by SD Chrostowska
Stanford University Press, £17.99
THIS short book is a contribution to academic debates within the tradition of thought known as critical social theory — the “Frankfurt School” — which has included writers such as Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas.
The general outlook was one critical of capitalism but more in terms of class relations as a system of domination, rather than primarily of exploitation.
In the post-war years the “school” became characterised by vehement opposition to “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet Union.
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JONATHAN TAYLOR is intrigued by an account of the struggle of Soviet-era musicians to adapt to the strictures of social realism
PHIL KATZ applauds the biography of a man of principle that is a vibrant excavation of the radical tradition itself
ANDY HEDGECOCK recommends the application of ‘Gothic Marxism’ for its memorable portrayal of the physical violence done to working people
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds an analysis of culture that explains why political conflicts today are focused more on values and identity than the economy and social questions