LEO BOIX recommends a ravishing, full-bodied drama about the intensely demanding and emotional art of Kabuki theatre
Latest editorial
Lessons from the past for the Labour left
ANDREW MURRAY welcomes a sympathetic history of two waves of left advance within Labour and the contest between the support they could mobilise and the forces ranged against them
HIGH WATER MARK: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks to the crowd at Glastonbury Festival, June 24 2017
On the day of the election, MARTIN GOLLAN reflects on the perennial relationship between the far-right and the back-hander
MARY CONWAY is gripped by the powerful emotional journeys portrayed by the parents of the perpetrator and victims of a mass shooting
LEO BOIX reviews a novel where shadows deceive and mortality looms, and a poetry collection that refuses to dim
ROBIN STYLES welcomes a boundary pushing work of fiction exploring the life and ideas of the godmother of modernism
PAUL DONOVAN recommends an energetic adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, that emphasises how psychiatry is a tool in the hands of a racist agenda
The Searchers
Andy Beckett, Allen Lane, £30
IT is impossible to read this book without a certain sense of pathos. Five years ago, three of its subjects — Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell — were on the verge of acceding to the highest offices in the land should Labour secure election victory.
Today, one struggles for re-election as an independent against his old party, another has just emerged from a 13-month suspension and brief barring from standing for Labour, and all three are marginalised within party and Parliament.
Guardian writer Andy Beckett ties their stories together with their contemporary Ken Livingstone and their predecessor Tony Benn in a collective quasi-biography that ambitiously aims to tell the story of the Labour left over the last 50 years or so.
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PETER MASON welcomes collected writings from Britain’s first black female publisher that focus on the place of black writers in literature
ANDREW MURRAY recommends a volume of essays that nail the visionless, racist and neoliberal character of policy under Starmer’s Labour Party
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes an exuberant blend of emotion and analysis that captures the politics and contrarian nature of the French composer
