CATHERINE STEEL relishes a compelling novel about Augustus’s right hand man, but misses the politics, the cultural shifts, and more detail about his restoration of Rome
The Kindly Ones
by Cliff James
Lethe Press £10.55
ALTHOUGH framed within the dystopian fictional tradition, The Kindly Ones is, in many ways, an analysis of contemporary US and indeed Western societies.
Set in an economically and environmentally devastated part of North America, Cliff James’s minutely observed second novel plots the trajectories of two very distinct groups of internal refugees.
HENRY BELL salutes a fine portrait of a revolutionary who remains a deeply significant and provocative figure
ALEX HALL welcomes a history of the Bund, and its emphatic demand for working-class solidarity across racial and ethnic difference
DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
The once beating heart of British journalism was undone by technological change, union battles and Murdoch’s 1986 Wapping coup – leaving London the only major capital without a press club, says TIM GOPSILL



