RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
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The political advantage of an anti-war position
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds a uniquely nuanced people’s history of the revolutionary period, told from below
blood
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
New releases from The Tenementals, Nik Bartsch’s Ronin, and Kuunatic
SCOTT ALSWORTH hears the call to burn down and rebuild the video game industry from the bottom up
The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924
Robert Service, Picador, £30
REFERENCES abound to similarities between the current geopolitical context — a combustible mixture of warmongering by corrupt elites, resentful nationalism, and brooding popular discontent — and circumstances on the eve of WWI.
Bellicose politicians today banging the war drums as a distraction would, therefore, do well to revisit the starkest lesson to emerge from a period during which a gasping Europe was drowned in a cauldron of blood.
The defining event of that era was not the Treaty of Versailles, but the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk — the separate peace agreed between the new Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia and the Central Powers.
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