The bard pays homage to his two muses: his wife and his football club

A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby
John Marsh, Monthly Review Press, £16.99
AS month two of the Trump 2.0 era careens forward, reading author and English professor John Marsh’s book is a wake-up call to systemic themes and trends as he unpacks culture and the economy over a century through the lens of Fitzgerald’s novel.
He revisits an influential work of fiction to examine an enduring “popular fascination with the rich – their houses, their clothes, their manners.” At the base of these cultural features is an economic system of, by and for the accumulation of capital held together by competition and class.

RON JACOBS welcomes a survey of US punk in the era of Reagan, and sees the necessity for some of the same today

SETH SANDRONSKY savours a personal account of the life and thought of the great Italian revolutionary

