The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE recommends an impressive impersonation of Bob Dylan
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
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Here, Vermiglio, William Tell and Wolf Man
New releases from Thorpe and Morrison, Daria Kulesh, and Will Finn and Rosie Calvert
RINA ARYA confronts the brutal operation of Francis Bacon’s approach to portraiture
Emphasising his continuous engagement in labour movement struggles, ALISTAIR FINDLAY salutes John Foster’s contribution as activist, strategist, intellectual and defender of the Morning Star
ANDY MIAH advocates the use of AI to assist people by expanding access to global literature and culture
EWAN KOTZ relishes a veteran Glasgow band that have lost none of their verve for live performance
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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ANGUS REID applauds the inventive stagecraft with which the Lyceum serve up Stevenson’s classic, but misses the deeper themes
ANGUS REID time-travels back to times when Gay Liberation was radical and allied seamlessly to an anti-racist, anti-establishment movement
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