ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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Lessons from the past for the Labour left
ANDREW MURRAY welcomes a sympathetic history of two waves of left advance within Labour and the contest between the support they could mobilise and the forces ranged against them
HIGH WATER MARK: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks to the crowd at Glastonbury Festival, June 24 2017
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
The Searchers
Andy Beckett, Allen Lane, £30
IT is impossible to read this book without a certain sense of pathos. Five years ago, three of its subjects — Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell — were on the verge of acceding to the highest offices in the land should Labour secure election victory.
Today, one struggles for re-election as an independent against his old party, another has just emerged from a 13-month suspension and brief barring from standing for Labour, and all three are marginalised within party and Parliament.
Guardian writer Andy Beckett ties their stories together with their contemporary Ken Livingstone and their predecessor Tony Benn in a collective quasi-biography that ambitiously aims to tell the story of the Labour left over the last 50 years or so.
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