Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, 1870-1924
Hjalmar Jorge Joffree-Eicho& Patrick Anderson
Daraja Press, £29.99

DESPITE the ironic title, the purposes of the book are entirely serious: the recall of a real revolutionary Lenin from under the layers of defamation and distortion, and the 101 authors radiate goodwill, hope and ironic cheer in what has been widely and for good reasons considered a hopeless time.

The best known is doubtless Slavoj Zizek, whose brief contribution is, for him, both cogent and understandable. The ones most enjoyable to me are less abstract or didactic than personal. 

Earl Bousquet, for instance, is a native of St Lucia, in the Caribbean, and he recalls conversations with his father, a ship’s bosun. Bousquet came of age politically in the heroic left-wing phase of Caribbean nationalism, spending two years as a journalist in Grenada at the time of that revolution (and counter-revolution). He has seen a lot, but most memorable is a memory given to him by his grandfather: how Russian boats, trolling the waters around the islands during the second world war engaged the German subs that had torpedoed ships in the harbour only a few hundred yards from the boy’s family home.