THE ongoing trial of those who murdered the West African revolutionary Thomas Sankara is one of the most significant political events of the year, and it was accompanied by the publication of Brian J Peterson’s biography of Sankara, A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa.

As the first and only book in English to combine a biographical account of Sankara’s life with a political account of the revolution, it is a landmark publication that draws existing material together with new evidence. It’s a thrilling and tragic story and Peterson does it justice. Essential reading.

I defy anyone to read the late Labour MP Maria Fyfe’s memoir of a Glasgow upbringing, Singing in the Streets, without being moved to tears. Published just before she died, it is more than a political autobiography, it is an outstanding contribution to Scottish letters, a working-class woman’s rite of passage written with heartwarming humour and humanity, Glaswegian grit and political clarity.

The publication of Robert Blomfield’s Edinburgh at last puts the unknown work of the shy medical student who was perhaps Britain’s greatest street photographer into the hands of the public.

Drawing on images that Blomfield made in the 1960s, this vision of the city and its people was unknown until his first exhibition in 2018, and now this magnificent book.

Concentrating on working-class communities he takes an X-ray of the city’s soul, seeing through the relentless gentrification to the austere Calvinism that lies beneath. His studies of children and adolescents are his masterpieces: disconcerting, very human, and timeless.

Another revelation came in conversation with the architects of Helsinki Central Library – a breathtaking building that recalls Joan Littlewood/Cedric Price’s Fun Palace.

It was fascinating to uncover how this extraordinary social initiative was enabled by the Finnish Left at a moment when they held power, and also digs into a collective memory of the Finnish Revolution of 1917/18. From Britain, it is important to recognise a culture that cherishes libraries and doesn't close them.

Lockdown also truncated an extraordinary season at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre: an ambitious and brilliant production of Brecht’s comedy Mrs Puntilla And Her Man Mutti was cut short, and the subsequent production of Jo Clifford’s version of the Spanish classic, Calderon’s Life is a Dream had to wait fully 18 months before crawling out of confinement more vivid and meaningful than ever.

Clifford herself reacted to the pandemic with Covid Requiem, a humanist ceremony organised to accommodate all the unnecessary grief that bad government has traumatised us with. And very movingly she took the time to speak to me at length about that, about politics and transgender rights.

But my own favourite play of this strange year was The Normal Heart, a perfect rendition of Larry Flynn’s 1984 masterpiece of agit-prop theatre.

I don't understand why a production this good, to which the audience gave a spontaneous standing ovation, is neither on tour nor available on the NT’s streaming service.