MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
‘Rock and pop music were the unexpected consequences of the working-class entering history’
BRETT GREGORY speaks with TOBY MANNING, author of Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music
Little Richard, 1984
[Ian Dryden/Los Angeles Times/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
WRITING in the Morning Star, Alistair Findley recommended this 565 page tome which “achieves the seemingly impossible by grounding high-level intellectual scholarship and theory within the popular culture of the day.”
So what initially inspired Manning to put pen to paper?
“I wrote the book after researching Marxist theory,” he says, “and I started to realise how much we skim over the surface of everything in the news and in our understanding of the world”.
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