CHRIS SEARLE hears the ordeal of the Palestinian people in the improvised musicianship of a UK jazz trio

Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics
Kenan Malik, Hurst, £20
EVENTS have not gone as Kenan Malik would have liked since about the 1960s and definitely not since the late 1980s and the Salman Rushdie affair. As an anti-capitalist activist, journalist, academic and broadcaster, the disarray and ineffectiveness of the left has been a major concern.
The problem has been the disappearance of class-based solidarity in favour of identity-based solidarity, and although he left the left (or perhaps, as he might put it, the left left him) he now explains the intellectual threads which brought the cleavage between class-based politics and culture-based politics.
Today’s “culture wars” are the present tail-end of this phenomenon. This book is a remarkable help in untangling some present threads and themes, although it doesn’t quite give us Ariadne’s thread out of the Labyrinth.

MARJORIE MAYO welcomes challenging insights and thought-provoking criticisms of a number of widely accepted assumptions on the left

As Starmer flies to Albania seeking deportation camps while praising Giorgia Meloni, KEVIN OVENDEN warns that without massive campaigns rejecting this new overt government xenophobia, Britain faces a soaring hard right and emboldened fascist thugs on the streets

