While riding the No 3 bus in Glasgow MATT KERR has ample time to dissect the moribund Scottish Labour decline into near oblivion and watch intriguing bus passenger dynamics
Two great ‘state of the nation’ summer reads
SOLOMON HUGHES recommends two novels that offer a social panorama on the way we live now
The best wildfire service may begin with the community, argues KOMAL RAJ ARYAL
Dignity is important to all humans, argues the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School, but it does not come about automatically. In a less than perfect world, dignity can accompany suffering, but the collective dignity of working people is achieved through acting together to change the world.
The US aim to reshape the existing order in the Middle East needs to be resolutely resisted, argues PAYAM SOLHTALAB
Concessions to Washington by the post-Maduro leadership in Caracas are designed to preserve the core of the Bolivarian Revolution not betray it, argue Roger D Harris, Francisco Dominguez and Mara Paez Victor. How the solidarity movement responds is critical
ALMA EGAN suggests four days out that bring the region’s history of protest to life
I’M ALWAYS on the lookout for what get called “State of the Nation” novels, so was pleased to have come across two of them in the wild recently.
A full-on State of the Nation novel is the kind of social panorama that takes in many levels of society and shows up social issues, a fiction that exposes social exploitation, like Dickens, or describes “The Way We Live Now,” like Trollope’s satire on corruption in Victorian Britain.
A lot of fiction has a very narrow focus on the personal lives of the comfortably off, so fiction doesn’t really have to be a “panorama” to get called “State of the Nation” — it can just present some view of people who worry about how to pay the bills as well as how to live their emotional lives.
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KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
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