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Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Radical insights into how we make history
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
A Radical History of the World
by Neil Faulkner
(Pluto Press, £14.99)
HISTORY, in our frenetic times, is increasingly seen as one damned thing after another. Not so with Neil Faulkner’s epic treatment, based on his Marxist understanding that mankind makes its own history but not under conditions of its own choosing.
[[{"type":"media","fid":"7699","view_mode":"inlineright","instance_fields":"override","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":""}]]In adopting a holistic approach, Faulkner provides an alternative to the received historical record, with his book ranging from the earliest appearance of hominins, our human forebears, to the present.
Breathtaking in its scope and exhaustive research it is highly readable as it explores the interplay of natural, geographical, technological and sociological factors that provide the circumstances in which, and through which, mankind can forge its destiny. Yet these have been contested by the political systems under which men and women have laboured.
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