As Colombia approaches presidential elections next year, the US decision to decertify the country in the war on drugs plays into the hands of its allies on the political right, writes NICK MacWILLIAM

CHOLERA was the big and recurring disease of the 19th century. There was no full understanding of its cause and why it was spread until the 1880s.
Britain, along with the rest of Europe, saw several significant epidemics in 1831-2 and in 1848-9, in both cases also periods of revolutionary political changes.
The disease was held to be one of the lower classes, as indeed it mainly was, because of the insanitary housing conditions they had little choice but to live in.

In 1981, towering figure for the British left Tony Benn came a whisker away from victory, laying the way for a wave of left-wing Labour Party members, MPs and activism — all traces of which are now almost entirely purged by Starmer, writes KEITH FLETT

Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT

KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past

The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT