From London’s holly-sellers to Engels’s flaming Christmas centrepiece, the plum pudding was more than festive fare in Victorian Britain, says KEITH FLETT
Latest editorial
Zdenek Horeni 1930 – 2021: to the last barricade
DR JOHN CALLOW remembers the famous editor of socialist Czechoslovakia’s leading newspaper who remained true to the socialist cause until the very end
In November 1989 Zdenek Horeni chaired a last session of the press commission that stretched on late into the night and appeared before his loyal staff at Rude Pravo to say farewell and to thank all of those who “had not turned their coats for a place in the sun”
Once the bustling heart of Christian pilgrimage, Bethlehem now faces shuttered hotels, empty streets and a shrinking Christian community, while Israel’s assault on Gaza and the tightening grip of occupation destroy hopes of peace at the birthplace of Christ, writes Father GEOFF BOTTOMS
From a lockdown digital project to a vital tool for class solidarity, ROBERT POOLE and HENRY FOWLER reflect on half-a-decade of struggle
After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
While pretending to seek peace, Europe is heading toward a collision course with Russia – using security guarantees, troop deployments, expropriation and censorship as tools, writes SEVIM DAGDELEN
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
ZDENEK HORENI, the former editor of Rude Pravo and leading correspondent for the Morning Star’s sister paper Halo Noviny, died in Prague’s Thomayer Hospital, on Friday February 12 2021, at the age of 91.
His long, rich and adventurous life as a campaigning journalist was shaped by his experiences of growing up under the Nazi occupation, by the February revolution of 1948 and by the struggle to maintain socialism in Czechoslovakia and latterly, the Czech Republic.
Born in the northern town of Frydstejn, on February 9 1930, on the fault line between Masaryk’s young republic and Hitler’s Germany, he witnessed the collapse of Czechoslovakia after the Munich accords of 1938 and the seizure of his hometown as part of the Sudetenland, territories effectively gifted by Western liberal democracy to Nazi Germany as the price of appeasement.
Similar stories
Charles Lubselski pays tribute to a lifelong communist and supporter of the Daily Worker and Morning Star
JOHN CALLOW examines what went wrong for the Czech communist party in the recent parliamentary elections, where it failed to meet the threshold to return deputies and some now talk of the party abandoning its commitment to socialism
As the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia rebuilds support through anti-cuts campaigns, the government seeks to silence it before October’s parliamentary elections through liberal totalitarianism, reports JOHN CALLOW
NICK WRIGHT examines the British ruling class's complex relationship with fascism before, during and after the second world war