GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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Marxist turned crime writer
PAUL BUHLE introduces a black US novelist whose fiction explores the complex subculture of the mixed-race working class of Cape Cod
View at the Fore River Shipyard, Quincy, Mass.
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The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
The Man Who Changed Colors
Bill Fletcher Jr, Hard Ball Press, £13.45
DASHIEL HAMMETT, the key writer in the 20th-century detective novel both in print and in screen adaptations of his work, had it right. “The Butler Did It,” the answer to the mystery in a 19th-century British novel, had the logic of the real-life crime upside down. It was the banker or the real estate developer or the police chief who did it and mostly got away with it.
Hammett, a militant anti-fascist and sometime lecturer at New York’s lefty Jefferson School, was blacklisted in Hollywood, although his novels could not be banned any more than audiences could be kept from watching “The Maltese Falcon.” Such is the fate of the Detective Left.
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PAUL BUHLE recommends an eminently useful book that examines the political opportunities for popular anti-fascist intervention
JOHN GREEN welcomes a remarkable study of Mozambique’s most renowned contemporary artist
PAUL BUHLE agrees that a grassroots movements for change in needed in the US, independent of electoral politics
The plan is to stigmatise and destabilise South Africa in preparation for breaking it up while creating a confused and highly racialised atmosphere around immigration in the US to aid in denying rights to non-white refugees, explains EMILE SCHEPERS