Celebrations of the centenary since his birth on 31 August 1921 have cemented the resurgence in interest in Raymond Williams (1921-1988), one of the Twentieth Century’s leading thinkers on the left. On 15 October, in partnership with the Raymond Williams Foundation, I...
I often wonder if Keir Starmer has a humiliation kink: whether he draws joy or pleasure from what one can only imagine is the sheer weight of humiliation and shame that must push itself down on his chest with every waking breath. It is, one might reasonably argue, the...
Anti-government protestors in front of the Presidential Secretariat in Sri Lanka on 13 April 2022. Photo by AntanO (Wikimedia Commons) Sri Lanka, the ultimate island travel destination, has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. We are in the middle of our...
The author, Jonathan Steele, and Mikhail Gorbachev after an interview in Moscow, 2011. For a few days after 30 August 2022 reports from Russia were not dominated by the latest bloodshed in Putin’s criminal war on Ukraine. The death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last...
Statues, flags and street names. Given the recurrent topics and tenor of discussions about the British empire in tabloid headlines and parliamentary polemic, you’d be forgiven for thinking that these are the sole focal points of British decolonial resistance in the...
Peter Brook at his theatre in Paris (Credit: Thomas Rome) Peter Brook’s death prompted a fanfare of tributes that have transformed his radicalism into theatrical chic. It’s what happens to our cultural icons. Once they are safely dead and unable to fire arrows at the...
Protesters wave the Mapuche flag on the streets of Chile. Photo by Pablo Bell (Instagram: @_pablobell) On Sunday 4 September 2022, Chilean voters convincingly rejected their country’s proposed new constitution. In a straight ‘approve’ or ‘reject’ referendum, reject...
The New York Stock Exchange. Photo by David Blaikie (licensed under CC BY 2.0) A critical examination of capitalism shows it can only function on violence. The sources of this violence vary extensively, from government military expenditure, surveillance and borders to...
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson visiting BAE Systems Warton in Preston, Lancashire (Credit: Andrew Parsons) With global military expenditure reaching record highs in 2021, before Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine, it is increasingly clear that the military...
Joe Strummer in 1980, via Wikimedia A songwriter of some political consequence, Joe Strummer was a wordsmith who articulated so passionately that you might feel yourself compelled to follow him anywhere and fight for the righteous cause. For some, experiencing the raw...
Churchill statue, 2020 Black Lives Matter protest. Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash. In the vast literature on Churchill, Tariq Ali’s latest book is path-breaking in two respects. First, who else has provided such an unrelenting, and convincing,...
‘Please spare a thought for people like me who have been tasked with the responsibility of looking after the 500-acre estate that’s been in the family for 950 years’ While people across the country moan about the so-called ‘cost-of-living crisis’, please spare a...