Book Review: The Woman Who Shot Mussolini: Frances Stonor Saunders - Faber and Faber (London  2010). 375pp
This is an unusual book.  It deals in detail with a dramatic (if overlooked) historical event and offers a thoughtful treatment of insanity in the early 20th century.  In the excellent first chapter we are treated to a [...]

Book Review: Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith In Beijing (Verso: 2008)
Giovanni Arrighi argues convincingly (in Adam Smith In Beijing) that we are seeing the end of the most rapacious social and economic system the world has ever known. What he calls ‘destructive capitalism’ is, he argues, a peculiarly Western form of accumulation that has almost destroyed [...]

Book Review:Yeats and Violence: Michael Wood (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Violence moves restlessly through Yeats’ poetry.  It is there in ‘The Magi‘ (written in 1913) with its Three Kings who ‘Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied’ wait for something more, another disturbance of the world order, a revelation of sorts, intimating an appetite for violence.
The violence in [...]

Book Review: Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists by Daniel Dorling, Policy Press (2010)
Over the last two decades or so, scholars concerned with social justice have offered a number of different frameworks for helping us to analyse the problem. These have included the extensively discussed two-dimensional approach that classifies issues under the headings of redistribution [...]

Book Review:The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, (2009) Verso.
It isn’t entirely clear why Verso thought now would be a good time to publish a book of extracts from the writings of the Situationists about the urban environment and experience. Editor Tom McDonough, whose excellent introductory essay renders much of the subsequent material [...]

Book review: ‘Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the 20th Century’ by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso, 2010)
This inspiring book examines how women challenged many aspects of public and private life between the 1880s and 1920s, in Britain and in the USA. They did so from different positions in the political spectrum, as liberals, socialists [...]

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010) Paperback £9.99 stg.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, an academically minded historical work that nonetheless spent nineteen weeks on the bestseller list in Israel, is a book that is much more incendiary than it ought to be. Sand’s basic thesis – that [...]

The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou (Verso 2010)
Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, edited by A.J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens (Acumen Publishing, 2010)
Badiou’s Being and Event, Christopher Norris (Continuum 2009)

Alain Badiou could be the most important philosopher alive today - time will tell - and his work is gradually reaching English-speaking readers. His magnum opus, Being [...]

Book Review: Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism, Natasha Walter (Virago 2010)

When the facts changed, Natasha Walter changed her mind. Or so she says in Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism, a book that describes how raunch culture has co-opted the language of choice and liberation and how the post-feminist cultural politics of celebrating doll-like [...]

Book Review: Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, Zero Books, 2009
Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman is a slim but muscular volume, whose pithy prose goes straight to the heart of the challenges currently facing contemporary feminism. Constructed as a series of short, cut-to-the-chase essays on a diverse range of ‘raw-nerve’ topics, from Sarah Palin and the [...]