ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review The Thing with Feathers, Train Dreams, Sisu: Road to Revenge, and Wicked: For Good
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‘The main task is, indeed, to awaken the women’s class consciousness and to incorporate them into the class struggle’ - Clara Zetkin
MICHAL BONCZA rounds up a series of images designed to inspire women
Liberty Leading the People, Eugene Delacroix; Rupert Garcia, Libertad Para Los Prisoneras Politicas! Freedom for political prisoners!, 1971, featuring Angela Davis who was held in a Manhattan prison at the times
[Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/cc; Rupert Garcia/Smithsonian Institution Archives/CC]
GUILLERMO THOMAS welcomes a biography of WA Domingo, a key figure in the anti-colonial struggle in the Caribbean
BRENT CUTLER is intrigued by the imperialist, supremacist and contradictory history of a word that is used all too easily
PETER MASON is beguiled by a fascinating account of the importance of cricket to immigrants from the Caribbean to the UK
The new corporate version of Robin Hood is a betrayal of the anti-colonial hero of the people of yore, suggests DENNIS BROE
PETER MASON is gripped by a novel that confronts corporate callousness with those prepared to act to bring about change
ONE of the most enduring revolutionary images in Western art is that of Liberty Leading the People painted by Eugene Delacroix in the Autumn of 1830 as a response to the July revolution of the same year, which saw France swap the House of Bourbon for the House of Orleans, an error that was only corrected in 1848 with the founding of the Second Republic.
The figure of Liberty is popularly referred to as “Marianne,” which symbolises, in popular consciousness, both ordinary people and the manifestation of their political aspirations: the Republic. The boy next to her with two pistols is believed to have inspired Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
The allegory of the female figure is rooted in language — in French, France, Republic, Liberty and Reason are feminine nouns.
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NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
Lenin’s theory of the weakest link shifted the centre of gravity of the proletarian revolution towards peoples’ struggles in the developing world, contrary to the expectation of Marx and Engels. The effect was to hinder the cause of socialism by decades. Time bring it back to its natural home, argues FAWZI IBRAHIM
MICHAL BONCZA recommends a compact volume that charts the art of propagating ideas across the 20th century