The Morning Star sorts the good eggs from the rotten scoundrels of the year just gone
Latest editorial
Geoffrey Pyke, Britain’s brilliant anti-fascist inventor
MAT COWARD looks at the personal ideology of a man as concerned with the psychology of inventing as with inventing itself, whose ideas about education – and contributions to the war effort against the Nazis – live on
The ice-based building material ‘pykrete’ narrowly missed deployment in WWII, though both have a fanbase in the modern scientific community
[Office of Stategic Services/ Creative Commons]
1943-2025: How one man’s unfinished work reveals the lethal lie of ‘colour-blind’ medicine
Labour’s decline, Tory exhaustion and the advance of Reform UK signal the end of stable two-party rule, with British politics entering a volatile new phase, says NICK WRIGHT
Why is welfare in its limited sense attacked when aimed at the poor? asks poignantly PAUL DONOVAN
BEN CHACKO says in different ways, the centenary of the General Strike and that of Fidel Castro’s birth point to priority tasks for the British left in the coming year
NICHOLAS MWANGI highlights a historic turning point in Sahelian sovereignty, as Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger bolstered their regional security through a unified military force
ON February 23 1948, the inventor Geoffrey Pyke was reported dead at his home in Hampstead by his landlady. He had clearly committed suicide, aged 54, though no-one was precisely sure why.
It was a tragic end to a life which had contained a great deal of achievement — and a great deal of pain. Obituaries noted his almost unparalleled importance as a thinker (“one of the greatest geniuses of his time”), his lack of public recognition and his eccentricity.
At the start of the first world war, Pyke had come up with the brilliant idea of becoming an undercover journalist for a British newspaper — in Berlin. At that time, the British secret service had failed to insert any of its agents into Germany, and Pyke didn’t speak German, so the odds weren’t really on his side. In October 1914, despite his forged US passport, he was arrested within a few days.
Similar stories
MAT COWARD tells the story of the eccentric founder of a short-lived but striking experiment in ‘vital democracy,’ who became best known for giving away his estate to the nation
‘Honest’ Tom Wharton’s 1682 drunken rampage through St Mary’s church haunted his political career, but his satirical song Lillibullero helped topple Catholic James II during the Glorious Revolution, writes MAT COWARD
MAT COWARD tells the extraordinary story of the second world war Spitfire pilot who became Britain’s most famous Stalag escaper, was awarded an MBE, mentored a generation of radio writers and co-founded a hardline Marxist-Leninist party
MAT COWARD recalls the communist and pacifist aristocrat whose commitment made a difference in the Spanish civil war, the Blitz and WWII Europe