GLENN BURGESS suggests that, despite his record in Spain, Orwell’s enduring commitment to socialist revolution underpins his late novels
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Red
by Neil Young
Rosa Luxemburg memorial at the site where her corpse was thrown into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin
[Manfred Brückels/CC] 
CHRISTOPHER POLLARD explains how and why neoliberalism adopted the racist agenda common to the populist right of today
SYLVIA HIKINS recommends a sweeping survey of the world's biggest desert and the people who live there
GUILLERMO THOMAS is persuaded by a scathing critique of the Church of England and its embeddedness in imperialism
MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Materialists, Unmoored, Together, and Bambi: A Tale of Life in The Woods
TONY BURKE revels in the publication of previously unreleased tracks by the great US folksinger
GORDON PARSONS endures heavy rock punctuated by Shakespeare, and a delighted audience
i.m. Rosa Luxemburg
Yours is the ghost in the waters even now.
When you were tipped into the Landwehr Canal
Europe sank. Too many worlds
that might have glanced their way
into being were not hewn.
A rifle butt, a shot to the skull,
the squalor and contempt of a few
hired men, that’s all it took.
History shrank. Peoples and nations
shrank to the drench of your skirt.
In some other version,
I can glimpse you keep on walking
beyond this moment,
the rifle is paused,
the trigger-finger hesitates:
Adolf stews obscurely in a gutter,
the sailors of Kronstadt prevail,
Leon goes back to reviewing,
the world tilts with you, Rosa,
this is your revolution worth knowing.
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