ANDY HEDGECOCK picks out his cultural highlights of 2025
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Extended trot
STEVEN ANDREW recommends an informed and personable work that contains as many ommisions as it does analyses
NO MINCING WORDS: Anti-Nato graffiti on a wall during the bombing of Novi Sad in 1999. Total civilian casualties of Nato bombings of Yugoslavia are estimated at probably 2,000 killed and about 6,000 wounded
[Darko Dozet/CC]
Star cartoonist MALC MCGOOKIN finds lessons for today in the punch, and the economy of line, of an extraordinary generation of illustrators
LEO BOIX, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Dreamers, It Was Just An Accident, Folktales, and Eternity
JENNY MITCHELL, poetry co-editor for the Morning Star, introduces her priorities, and her first selection
HENRY BELL is sceptical of the notion that ‘progress’ is an ideology that the ruling class uses exclusively to camouflage appropriation
In search of political understanding, MATTHEW HAWKINS welcomes a critique of anti-semitism as codified by the Israeli state
BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024
Tariq Ali, Verso, £35
HAVING thoroughly enjoyed Tariq Ali’s earlier autobiographical book, Street Fighting Years, and having more than appreciated many other works such as his widely read and timely The Clash Of Fundamentalisms, it’s nice to report that this latest momentous tome was in no way a disappointment.
That said, it’s very different from Ali’s earlier life story in that it is a huge, unwieldy and somewhat chaotic collection. It is fair to say that Ali is not without a shortage of interests — or a shortage of words for that matter — and I won’t even attempt to list the number of subjects covered in an account by no means chronological and seamless in treatment.
Ali’s movement away from more overtly ideological forms of Trotskyism is documented by notes on internal struggles within the International Marxist Group which he left to join a leftwards-shifting Bennite Labour Party, and by his relationship with key international figures such as Ernest Mandel.
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JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
STEVE ANDREW welcomes a political interrogation of the contradiction between ecological awareness and a dietary crisis in today’s food consumption
CARLOS MARTINEZ welcomes the publication of the writings of the great Palestinian author, political theorist and spokesman for the PFLP