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
Trump
by Alain Badiou
(Polity, £9.99)
ALAIN BADIOU’S is a book of “instant” philosophy – and it is all the better for that.
Trump comprises two very short lectures delivered immediately after the election of the eponymous subject as US president. It’s the work of a longstanding Marxist theoretician, who uses a lifetime’s analytical experience to cut through the nonsense and ephemera of other commentaries.
Capitalism has extracted itself from crisis before, argues PRABHAT PATNAIK – but through methods no longer available. So it is turning to authoritarianism, militarism and neocolonialism
Renewed illusions in social democratic reformism are sprouting as a result of Andy Burnham’s rhetoric, but material conditions are already intruding into the debate, argues NICK WRIGHT
The social base of the old Tory Party has disappeared as surely as that of Labour, argues ANDREW MURRAY – today’s right are the debased offspring of a capitalism that speculates without investing and profits without producing
ALEX HALL is fascinated by a lucid and historically convincing account of how rent has dominated capitalist economies from feudalism to modernity



